Contexts Crawler

This morning the Guardian (UK) reported on the battle over Proposition 8 in California. Proposition 8, also known as the ‘California Marriage Protection Act,’ is a proposed amendment to California’s state Constitution which will only recognize heterosexual unions, eliminating the right of same-sex couples to marry. The Guardian article describes this battle as emblematic of a larger cultural divide in the United States. 

The Guardian reports:

Conservative and evangelical groups were freshly mobilised by the California supreme court’s decision in May to overrule voters’ approval of a ban on same-sex marriages in 2000.

But the movement has its roots in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, says University of California-Berkeley sociology professor Michael Hout.

“They got as far as they could on abortion and have embraced marriage laws as the next step in their agenda,” said Hout, co-author of The Truth About Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe. “Their main agenda remains the reversal of Roe v Wade, but they’re trying to gain new allies who look askance at gay marriage.”

Not that it’s a purely Machiavellian manoeuvre. Proponents of bans on same-sex marriage are “truly concerned that the state should not be licensing immoral behaviour”, Hout said.

“In their interpretation of the Bible, they see a prohibition on homosexual activity. Gay marriage condones a lifestyle that’s ruled out by their reading of the scripture.”

Read the full story.

US News and World Report ran a story entitled ‘A Sociologist’s Take on Abortion‘ on Adam Voiland’s ‘On Men’ blog. 

Voiland writes:

Earlier this week, I blogged about a conference on how abortions impact men emotionally. I pointed out that there’s a dearth of dispassionate research exploring whether the controversial procedure affects men’s mental health. That’s very much the case, but I’d like to follow up with perspective, as well as some data, from one of the few academic researchers who has tackled the issue: Arthur Shostak, an emeritus professor of sociology at Drexel University. We weren’t able to connect before that post.

Since the early 1980s, Shostak has been periodically surveying and interviewing what he calls “waiting-room men”—the 600,000 or so guys who sit and wait each year as their partners undergo an abortion, and who help them return home afterward. Though firmly pro-choice, Shostak says he considers every abortion “a tragedy” and cites reducing the need as one of the reasons he studies how the procedure affects men. Thirty years ago, he went through an abortion with his partner; since then, he has surveyed upward of 3,000 waiting-room men about their experiences.

After reading about Shostak’s work, Voiland conducted an interview with him and posted excerpts on his blog. Read it here.

EurWeb.com reported on a study presented at the American Sociological Association meetings earlier this month about how the dramatic increase in the prison population since the early 1970s may be having significant demographic consequences that “disproportionately affect black males.” 

The study from Becky Pettit and Bryan Sykes of the Univeristy of Washington found that “the jump in incarceration rates represents ‘a massive intervention’ in Black families and may be responsible for lowered rates of fertility, increased and involuntary migration to rural areas as well as greater exposure to infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS.”

EurWeb.com adds:

According to Pettit, the justice system “has become more punitive” and one result is that 1 of every 100 Americans is currently behind bars and nearly 60 percent of those are young, most low-income Black males. This fact, she suggest, has led to an increased number of men not producing children and the resulting drop in the Black fertility rate.

Full story.

A new article from the ‘Health’ section of Newsweek magazine explores how the gloom and doom of current economic news might have a real physical effect on us. The fear of losing one’s job is a daily concern for many Americans and the physical and mental health consequences are now being documented by social science research.

A psychologist weighs in…

Layoffs create a sense of hopelessness. Stress-related complaints such as insomnia and headaches tend to follow, lingering even after victims find new jobs, says University of Michigan psychologist Richard Price, who tracked more than 700 layoff victims for two years. Research based on 17 years of Pennsylvania unemployment records concluded that employees affected by a mass layoff at a plant were 15 percent more likely to die of any cause over the next two decades. Experts blame the cascade of misfortune that often ensues after a layoff, including the loss of health insurance.

The sociological perspective…

Your health can suffer simply from fear of losing your job, says Sarah Burgard, a sociologist at the University of Michigan. After crunching data from two large national surveys, she concluded that chronic job insecurity over a two-year period rivals the anxiety of a job loss or a major illness. Burgard adjusted her data for what psychologists call “neuroticism” and found that even people who aren’t typically worriers report worse health when they believe their jobs are in danger. Fears of poor job prospects may have similar consequences. 

Full story.

USA Today reports that new Census data released this week suggest that 6.4 million opposite sex couples live together (as of 2007), up from less than one million thirty years ago. This means that cohabiting couples now make up nearly 10% of all opposite sex couples, including those who are married. 

In comparison, the Census bureau reported 5 million unmarried, opposite-sex households in 2006, but that figure was based on a question that many respondents found to be unclear. In the 2007 supplemental survey sample of 100,000 households, the Census questions asked more directly whether respondents had “a boyfriend/girlfriend or partner in the household” and found 1.1 million more couples.

The USA Today article included comments from two sociologists:

Pamela Smock,. a sociologist at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who studies cohabitation, says the new data gets closer to the truth, but because it’s a point-in-time survey, it still misses the extent of cohabitation in today’s society.

“It’s a snapshot,” she says. “It’s not telling you how many people have ever cohabited, which is much more than that.” …

Sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago, who has done extensive research into marriage and cohabitation, says living together in the USA isn’t very stable or long-term, compared to some Scandinavian countries where it’s more likely to be a long-term committed relationship.

But in the USA, she says, it’s become “part of the life course.” ”It’s something people do that leads to somewhere,” she says. “If it doesn’t lead to marriage, it leads to splitsville.”

The full story.