Real Talk: Social Science on Same-Sex Marriage "Radically Inconclusive"

[Valin]

Ricochet:

Mollie Hemingway

3/25/13

 

Andrew Ferguson has a brief discourse on same-sex marriage and social science that no one should miss. Not only are his points important, but he writes with a clarity and humor that few others can master.

 

He begins by discussing the Leon Kass-Harvey Mansfield amicus brief filed before the Supreme Court on the limitations of social science and cultural and political life:

 

The brief is an attempt at intellectual hygiene. Among the many annoying tics of contemporary liberalism is its insistence that liberal social policies are always and everywhere determined by the latest findings of social science. Redistribution, affirmative action, tighter economic regulation—name the policy and you’re sure to find some associate professor of some social science or another beavering away with a labful of undergraduates to discover its benefits. Such are the claims made for gay marriage. “More than thirty years of social science,” as one piece of NPR agitprop declared on Morning Edition last week, have demonstrated that children raised by homosexual couples show “no difference” in social outcomes from children reared in heterosexual households. And more recent cutting-edge data show the salubrious effects of gay marriage in general. We are told.

 

Kass and Mansfield note that the culture warrior research has a long history of being shaped by ideology. Neither the American Psychiatric Association's position that homosexuality is a "mental disorder" nor its renunciation of same had to do with science.

 

(Snip)

 

Which brings us back to the central point that Mansfield and Kass make in their compelling brief: We don’t know what the consequences of gay marriage will be. (We do suspect that such a thing will be less socially divisive if enacted by popular will than by the say-so of judges.) Social science is all but mute on the subject and will have nothing useful to tell us for decades. Lacking objective evidence, suspicious of a rising political hysteria, wary of hidden motives, and unmoved by social blackmail, we would do well to submit to humility, deference, discretion, modesty—all those virtues that conservatives are said to prize. If nothing else, these should be sufficient to stay the judges’ hand, and to let the people themselves decide, if a decision must be made, when or whether tradition is to be disowned.