Marriage & prejudice

The right’s prejudice in favour of marriage can sometimes lead it to some very sloppy thinking. Two recent pieces suggest this.
First, the Spectator’s leader cites ONS research showing that married men are more likely to find work that single ones, and infers that “perhaps it’s time to chivvy the unemployed to church.”  This inference suffers from two problems.
One is: why does marriage enhance employability? It could be because marriage causes men to want to work more, perhaps to escape the wife’s nagging. Or it could be that marriage is merely correlated with factors that make men attractive to employers: good social skills, reliability, a conventional mindset etc. There’s lots of research (pdf) on this question - none of which the Spectator cites - which is gloriously ambiguous.
This question matters. If the marriage-employability link is correlative rather than causal, then chivvying the unemployed to get married won’t improve their chances of getting a job, simply because it won’t give them the features that make men employable.
But even if the relationship is causal, there’s another problem - the fallacy of composition.  It might be true that being married increases an individual man’s chances of finding work. But for all men, the chances of getting work depend upon aggregate demand.  Yes, you could tell a story in which  if men become more employable, demand for labour will eventually increase. But it won‘t do so immediately, and the Speccie doesn’t even try to tell this story.
Speaking of bad articles brings me to Jan Moir‘s now notorious piece. On first reading, I thought this was cunningly written, intended to convey an innuendo without exactly saying so. Reading her “apology”, however, makes me suspect it’s just slovenly rubbish.
Now, many people have objected to Moir’s frothing, hateful, sickening homophobia. There is, though, another flaw - she’s committed an elementary howler of reasoning. She’s taken two cases - the deaths of Kevin McGee and Stephen Gately - and drawn some kind of inference: “the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships“, a “more dangerous lifestyle”. But she hasn’t asked the basic question: what is the sample from which these observations are drawn? She seems to be drawing inferences from the extreme of a distribution without asking: what are the properties of that distribution? This is just irrational.
Had she began from those cases, then asked: are gay civil partnerships generally less happy than straight marriages? and produced good evidence on this question, she might have had a perfectly acceptable article.
As it is, she’s just failed statistics 101, and shown an inability to think.
I say this not to question the value of marriage; for some legitimate evidence, try this pdf. I do so merely to point out that some of its advocates sometimes produce mere irrational babble.

Comments

[Diversity]

The correlation between advocacy of marriage and mere irrational babble is obsevably high. So is the correlation between advocacy of free love and irrational babble.

Might the general phenomenon be that emotional (or faith) based arguers for or against an institution or an idea are prone to episodes of irrational babble? Blogshere comments about fields as various as legal abortion and the efficient markets hypthethis seem to be congruent with that interpretation.

[Recusant]

I don't know about "emotional(or faith)based arguers" - aren't all arguments emotionally based fundamentally? Our disposition driving our outlook - but the Burkean argument works for me: the fact that at all times and in all cultures marriage has been seen as the desirable state.

[jameshigham]

The Quiet Man wrote today:

Jan Moirs article in the Daily Mail sent several Twitterers and bloggers into overdrive because she said something they didn't like, pointing out some details over the death of Stephen Gately and the possibility that his relationship was anything but natural.

Chris says:

The right’s prejudice in favour of marriage can sometimes lead it to some very sloppy thinking.

The only sloppy thinking is by those who think a deviation form the norm can become a norm and that human realtions can be reduced to debit and credit sides of the ledger.

[Ulrich S]

jameshigham wrote this:

"The only sloppy thinking is by those who think a deviation form the norm can become a norm"

Norms change all the time. Slavery was once a norm.

[indigomyth]

jameshigham,
//pointing out some details over the death of Stephen Gately //

What details? What new information did she provide, other than to speculate that his death was not natural, which is contrary to the evidence as assessed by a trained coroner. All the details would have had to be considered by the coroner when they issued a verdict of natural death - Moir's speculation to the contrary based upon nothing but her own prejudice is idiotic.

//The only sloppy thinking is by those who think a deviation form the norm can become a norm//

Never heard of evolution then? Random mutations? Natural selection?

Moron

[jameshigham]

Indigomyth - ad hominem does not an argument make. This has got nothing to do with evolution. It has got to do with a deviation form the norm, the norm being heterosexual relations as it has always been, despite the desperate attempts of PC constructionists to make it otherwise.

Instead of calling me moron, why don't you get a dose of reality.

[jameshigham]

Drs. Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse [Dr. Stanton L. Jones and Dr. Mark A Yarhouse, Homosexuality: The Use of Scientific Research in the Church’s Moral Debate, (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2000) p. 57; referring to Edward O. Laumann, John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael and Stuart Michaels, the Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States, (ChicagoL University of Chicago Press, 1994), table 9.14, p. 344.], analyzed data from a comprehenisve survey of sexual behavior in America. They wrote:

Experience of sexual abuse as a child, in other words, more than tripled the likelihood of later reporting homosexual orientation. Other studies have reported the same trend.

In 1995, Dr. Thomas Schmidt, author of Straight and Narrow, [Dr. Thomas Schmidt, Straight and Narrow? (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1995) p. 148, see also 114-115; the reference to “4%” comes from a study by J. M. Siegal, et al., “the Prevalence of Childhood Sexual Assault,” American Journal of Epidemiology 126 (December, 1986): 1141-1153. The numbers on homosexual abuse come from L.S. Doll, et all, “Self-Reported Childhood and Adolescent Sexual Abuse Among Adult Homosexual and Bisexual Men,’ Child Abuse and Neglect 16, (1992), p. 855-64; and the numbers on age of first sexual experience from D.P. McWhirter and A. M. Mattison, The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prengice-Hall, 1984), pp, 269 and 271.], cited two different studies about high rates of sexual abuse in homosexual and bisexual men. He writes:

Nevertheless, it is disturbing to find that although under 4 percent of boys are molested by men, a recent major study found that the rate of childhood molestation by men among homosexual or bisexual men was nearly ten times that (35 percent). It is also notable that 75 percent of homosexual men report their first homosexual experience prior to the age of sixteen, as compared to 22 percent of heterosexual men reporting their first heterosexual experience.

In an effort to lay the groundwork for identifying and indoctrinating so-called “gay” children – the researchers in Unequal Opportunity [David W. Purcell, Jocelyn D. Patterson and Pilgrim S. Spikes, Jr., “Childhood Sexual Abuse Experienced by Gay and Bisexual Men: Understanding the Disparities and Interventions to Help Eliminate Them,” in Richard J. Wolitski, Ron Stall, and Ronald O Valdiserri, eds., Unequal Opportunity, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 72-96.] suggest:

If a boy’s sexual orientation could be identified when he is a youth, then extra efforts might be taken to protect boys who would grow up to be gay so as to help eliminate the CSA disparity. To the extent that child abusers use gender nonconformity in boys as a means of identifying victims who might be easier to target, parents can help protect all of their children by talking about sexuality, self-protection, and boundaries.”

Dr. Dean Byrd [Ph.D. in psychology, and postdoctorate degrees in Child and Family Psychology and Behavioural Medicine] referenced, in an interview, Diane Shrier and Robert L. Johnson, “Sexual Victimization of Boys: An Ongoing Study of an Adolescent Medicine Clinic Population,” Journal of the National Medical Association 80, (1988); he also references Richard C. Friedman and Jennifer I Downey, “Homosexuality,” The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. #331 (1994): 923-930, (27 April 2009) which stated:

Sexual abuse contributes to the derailing of biological priming which is the process definition for homosexuality. Boys who are targeted for sexual abuse are NOT targeted because they are gay. They are targeted because they are vulnerable. Gender non-conformity – which is the only characteristic that is predictive for later homosexuality – is often characteristic of these vulnerable boys.

Judith Reisman, president of the Institute for Media Education, said that Department of Justice statistics showed that 67 percent of all reported sex abuse victims were children and 64 percent of forcible sodomy victims were boys under 12.

The gay mafia tries assiduously to maintain that there is no link between homosexuality and paedophilia, in the sense that only a small percentage of homosexuals are paedophiles but they do not equally establish that only a small percentage of paedophiles have either histories of homosexuality or that many of those children later becomes homosexual as a result of his experiences, as touched on above.

So yes - there is plenty of evidence about, Chris, that it is not a happy situation and the nature of the death referred to by Ms Moir whom I admit could have done it better was not at all a surprise.

Indigomyth - argue to facts, not ad hominem, my friend.

[David Boycott]

It's a bit rich for you to criticise the work of other people for lacking quantitative support and then to accuse Moir of "frothing, hateful, sickening homophobia."

You may disagree with her article, but there is nothing in it to justify that label.

[jameshigham]

David is right here although much of what you write, Chris, is tongue in cheek and that's how I see this one.

[john malpas]

What is wrong with glorious ambiguity?
It is the substance of life.
Married men were held to be 'safe' in past years. Not so likely to steal the petty cash or run off with the owners wife.