Nate Silver has an interesting post up on constitutional bans on same-sex marriage and divorce rates, the results of which may be surprising to some. Says Silver,

Overall, the states which had enacted a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage as of 1/1/08 saw their divorce rates rise by 0.9 percent over the five-year interval. States which had not adopted a constitutional ban, on the other hand, experienced an 8.0 percent decline, on average, in their divorce rates. Eleven of the 24 states (46 percent) to have altered their constitutions by 1/1/08 to ban gay marriage experienced an overall decline in their divorce rates, but 13 of the 19 which hadn’t did (68 percent).

Following up on the above table, Silver adds,

The differences are highly statistically significant. Nevertheless, they do not necessarily imply causation. The decision to ban same-sex marriage does not occur randomly throughout the states, but instead is strongly correlated with other factors, such as religiosity and political ideology, which we have made no attempt to account for. Nor do we know in which way the causal arrow might point. It could be that voters who have more marital problems of their own are more inclined to deny the right of marriage to same-sex couples.

Noting Silver’s comment about causation, what I think is most interesting about these numbers is that they seem to debunk the notion that the introduction of same-sex marriage into a given population will in some way devalue the institution of marriage, which, one would assume, would be likely to result in an increase in divorce rates.

The numbers north of the border seem to offer the same basic conclusion. A recent study from professor emeritus Anne-Marie Ambert for the Vanier Institute for the Family shows that divorce rates in Canada are down significantly from their peak in 1987, as the below graph from HRSDC demonstrates,

The drop in Canadian divorce rates between the late 1980s/1990s and present is less interesting to me vis-a-vis this discussion than is to note that Ambert’s study and the latest numbers from Statistics Canada place current rates of divorce in Canada at approximately 38%, as compared to 2003 rates of 35.3%. At a time when Canada’s overall population grew by approximately 5% between 2003-2008, those numbers strike me as statistically insignificant.

And what happened smack in the middle of that time frame? That’s right, on July 20, 2005 same-sex marriage was legalized in Canada.

The take home message? There might not be any reliable data demonstrating that legalizing same-sex marriage strengthens the insitution of marriage by reducing rates of divorce, but there is reliable data that demonstrates legalizing same-sex marriage does not weaken the insitution of marriage by increasing rates of divorce.

Okay people.  It’s time for all of you to pile on Scott and Chris.  Turns out they’re the bad guys in the whole climate change kerfuffle: [Read more →]

I ran across this story yesterday but didn’t have a chance to post about it. I appreciate a great deal what newly installed Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page is doing here by drawing attention to the gaps in funding that his office is receiving in trying to do what is arguably a vital job in regards to transparency and accountability in our Canadian democracy. Feeling confident in knowing how money is spent being by government in countries like the US and Canada given the economic challenges facing each can be a full time job in and of itself given the numbers and intricacy of legislation involved.

It’s no wonder whatsoever that the Congressional Budget Office (created in 1974, as opposed to our 2006!) in the US has played such a pivotal role in determining the viability of  important initiatives. Indeed, the independent analysis provided on matters budgetary by the CBO is, in many cases, sacrosanct precisely because of its impartiality. Within the context of a politics so obviously marked by partisan wrangling, this kind of analysis is irreplaceable for a whole host of reasons.

Which is why it rankles so that the CBO’s Canadian cousin is fighting just to get the budget it was promised by the Prime Minister’s office. That the PBO has had some differences of opinion with the numbers presented to Canadians by the Minister of Finance only makes me more ardent in my belief that this is money well spent and  that the PBO should be funded at the levels necessary to, you know, properly staff it. [Read more →]

You should read Jonathan McLeod’s recent post up at The Politic on DADT and refuge for war resisters in Canada.

Bloc Quebecois MP Francine Lalonde’s private member’s “right-to-die” bill, tabled in May 2009, now seems to be prompting a debate on the topic of euthanasia in the province of Quebec where the Fédération des médecins spécialistes du Québec have come out supporting the legalization of euthanasia and calling for a discussion of the topic based on polling results of its membership,

Of 2,025 medical specialists who answered a poll on the subject, 75 per cent said they were “certainly” or “probably” in favour of legalizing euthanasia, as long as the practice were strictly regulated.

The president of the federation of medical specialists, Dr. Gaétan Barrette, said doctors already see some form of euthanasia in the course of their work.

“Eighty one per cent of doctors do see the practice of euthanasia given the circumstances in their practice,” Barrette said. “They hear their patients, they see their patients, asking for it.”

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Scott’s long and deeply-felt reflection on American gun culture is worth reading in full, and I certainly understand why an outsider would find our collective infatuation with things that go ‘boom’ baffling or even dangerous. As a card-carrying coastal elite, I also suspect my views on personal firearms are closer to Scott’s than to most rural Americans’: In addition to not owning a gun, I have never wanted to own one, and watching someone casually stroll by with a glock on their hip is enough to make me pretty uncomfortable.

That said, I’m wary of broad-brushed cultural essentialism, and I think Scott’s view of America’s “undercurrent of violence” is a bit too reminiscent of s0mething Mark Steyn spat out in the wake of another tragedy, this time in Canada:

Every December 6th, my own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the “Montreal massacre,”  the 14 female students of the Ecole Polytechnique murdered by Marc Lepine (born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you’d never know that from the press coverage). As I wrote up north a few years ago:

Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Obviously, these men didn’t exactly cover themselves in glory in the midst of a terrible shooting. But does the inaction of a few scared students indict Canadian society as a whole? Does this incredible tragedy  reveal some hidden undercurrent of Canadian passivity? I think not, and besides, a quick Google search reveals any number of counter-examples (the honor roll of Canadian dead in Afghanistan immediately comes to mind.

Violence in America is less extensive than you might think. And broad-brushed essentialism – however intuitive – detracts from our ability to address serious problems by laying blame at the feet of some socially-constructed bogeyman. Sometimes schoolbus bullying is just bullying. And sometimes a shooting is just a terrible tragedy.

In the spirit of my new intention to keep my posts here on the shorter side of the street (unlike in the past), I offer you the following rant.

I’m a bit late on weighing in on the health care debate, I admit. The American discussion about health care reform always rings so very foreign to my, well, foreign ears. It is one of the few areas where I feel my Canuck-ness holding me back from really and truly being able to participate in the discussion in a full-bodied fashion.

Score one for cultural relativism, I suppose.

Of a heartening note is the degree of recognition that seems to be present about the need for reform. Of course, what that reform winds up looking like is the fat in this fire. One of the lines of thought that always causes my head to shake is the doom, gloom, and, frankly, fear mongering that debaters on both sides often exhibit when talking about the single-payer systems in other comparable countries like Canada and the UK. To listen to some health care advocates talk, you’d think that communist Russia was a picnic compared to what we poor proletariat saps endure on a day-to-day basis.
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