In California, few same-sex couples marry
• The New York Times reports that California is home to 109,000 same-sex couples.
• According to the University of California at Los Angeles, 11,440 gay couples have tied the knot in California since the state supreme court legalized same-sex marriage in May.
• If all of these newly married gay couples were California residents, then only 10.5% of the state’s same-sex pairs have married. (This calculation obviously ignores single gay Californians. If we count them, the percentage of all gay Californians who’ve married falls accordingly.)
• But as the Times reports:
“For certain, some portion of these 11,000 are not California residents,” said Mr. Gates, adding that the counties that have seen the biggest increases in weddings “tend to correlate with tourist places in the state.”
• Any pent-up demand for a marriage license among California’s gay couples is now presumably at the apex of its expression, especially since the state’s voters appear to be on the verge of amending their constitution to undo the supreme court’s ruling.
• At best, then, only a fraction of California’s gay couples have married, and even this fraction emerged when demand for a same-sex marriage license was at its peak.
• So we see now in California what we saw in Massachusetts: Few gays bother with marriage. What’s more, if gay marriage in California is the same lesbian-centered phenomenon that is in Massachusetts, then the number of gay male Californians who’ve married is small enough that they can share a cab.
• Why are gays, and especially gay men, apparently uninterested in tying the knot? And does the paucity of gay marriages strengthen or weaken the case for same-sex marriage?