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It’s fun to watch opponents of gay marriage run out of arguments. It’s like a really good nature documentary when the chase is engaging – even though the outcome is predetermined.
We know the lioness is going to bring down the gazelle, however fast it may run and however long it may fight.
We know who is going to win the gay marriage fight, too. We just don’t know when.
In the meantime, the desperate opposition – gazelles all around, replete with herd mentality – will take anything they can get.
Childish and personal insults are not out of the question, but there has emerged a proclivity to attempt to appeal to logic.
Well, of course no respectable person wants to argue against gay marriage by way of promising death by fire from the hand of the vengeful and jealous Old Testament God.
This has to make sense somehow.
There is the argument that traditional marriage somehow serves as the literal glue of all civilization, though no one can really explain how.
Allowing gays to partake in this mysterious, powerful magic will tear it asunder, though, again, no one can really explain how.
There’s the old piece about how a child must simultaneously and perpetually be in the presence of both a father and a mother if he or she can ever hope to grow into a functional adult, though we don’t adhere to that idea when it comes to any other aspect of family law, especially divorce custody.
There is the sort of anti-Malthusian doomsday argument, in which society dies out because everyone has turned gay and stopped reproducing, which may or may not have originated in an episode of South Park.
All of these have a certain beauty in their absurdity.
But my favorite of all is the argument that gay marriage will be bad for the economy.
As it goes, allowing more people to get married will cause an increase in government and business payouts and thus an increase in taxes and consumer prices, which will ultimately just cost everyone a lot of money.
Richard Posner, a federal judge and economic theorist who can be accused of being no manner of liberal, said in a 2008 blog post: "... the consequences (of gay marriage) would be small simply because the homosexual population is small and many homosexual couples will not bother to marry; many heterosexual couples nowadays do not bother to marry ..."
Excusing Posner’s use of the outdated and rejected term "homosexual" – which clearly identifies the author as someone who doesn’t otherwise take much interest in gay and lesbian issues – the logic is simple.
Today, fewer couples of any gender combination get married, and there just aren’t very many gays and lesbians to begin with. (Posner roundly rejects the popular Kinsey-based hypothesis that gays make up 10 percent of the population, and he is right to do so.)
Federal recognition of same-sex marriage would trigger the payout of various federal benefits to qualified couples, adding overall costs to the payroll but not by much.
Meanwhile, laws governing the finances of married couples would eliminate transaction costs in the event of death or divorce, creating overall savings, though, again, not by much.
Posner suggests that these two effects would serve to cancel each other out, creating neither costs nor savings for the public sector.
A 2009 article in the Christian Science Monitor goes further, by saying marriage "... provides a safety net for spouses, an expansion of marriage results in more people becoming ineligible for state benefits."
A study in Maine found that the state could save $7.3 million annually as a result of this effect.
The same article notes that because same-sex couples are statistically more likely to have two incomes than opposite-sex couples, more of those couples will fall into higher tax brackets when filing jointly.
Translated from economics to English, it sounds like this: Married couples, overall, receive less in benefits and pay more in taxes. Same-sex couples, overall, have higher incomes and fewer children, so they will receive even less in benefits and pay even more in taxes.
In Massachusetts, a study found that same-sex marriage has earned the state an additional $110 million since it began in 2004.
The CSM article quotes M.V. Lee Badgett, research director at the Williams Institute and economics professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst: "It’s a lot of couples spending a lot of money."
Well, how about that.
The economic argument against gay marriage is not just weak and unfounded; it in fact represents precisely the opposite of what every bit of evidence suggests will happen.
All we are asking for is the right to receive less money from the government, pay more in taxes and pump more money into local economies.
You know, now that I look at it that way, maybe I don’t want to get married after all.
