hunter of justice

New study shows no educational harm to children in gay families

Stanford Sociology Professor Michael Rosenfeld has just published an article in Demography describing the first large-sample, nationally representative tests of educational outcomes for children raised by same-sex couples. Professor Rosenfeld's results show that children of same-sex couples are as likely to make normal progress through school as children living in most other family structures. Heterosexual married couples are the family type whose children have the lowest rates of grade retention, but the advantage of heterosexual married couples is mostly due to their higher socio-economic status. 

The citation for the article -  Nontraditional Families and Childhood Progress Through School- is 47 Demography 755 (August 2010). Demography is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Population Association of America.

Another finding in the Rosenfeld article, combined with a recent study of child development in gay families who adopt, should make a difference in adoption cases. The Demography article reports that children of all family types (including children of same-sex couples) are far more likely to make normal progress through school than are children living in group quarters (such as orphanages and shelters).

Sexuality and gender law symposium issue published

UCLA Law Review has published the ipapers presented at its symposium last February on Sexuality and Gender Law: Assessing the Field, Envisioning the Future. The event was co-sponsored by the Williams Institute. You can download pdf's of the articles here. Authors include Kathy Abrams, Kim Buchanan, Mary Anne Case, Scott Cummings and Doug Nejaime, Bill Eskridge, Suzanne Goldberg, Sonia Katyal, Teemu Ruskola, Kenji Yoshino, and yours truly.

Queer and (in the) country

Following is an interview in Wiretap magazine
with Mary Gray, author of Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America, a new book on rural gay life. The author, a professor in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University, is doing readings this fall in New York, DC, San Francisco, Philadelphia and other locations; full schedule and details are here. Although not about legal issues,the discussion opens a window onto an aspect of lgbt political and social life about which little is known.

The advice given to queer and questioning youth by gay rights icon Harvey Milk was simple: Move to the nearest city. Why is this statement a disservice to queer rural youth?

This sentiment effectively tells rural LGBTQ-identifying youth they can't be happily queer right where they are and should expect -- perhaps deserve -- hostility if they do stay in their communities.

Many of the youth I met struggled with reconciling the deep connection or pride they feel for their hometowns with the popular representation of their communities as backward, ignorant and unlivable -- not just for queer folks, but for anyone with taste or class. They feel they're not supposed to see their communities as viable options, and are being told they need to choose between being queerly out of place in the country and moving to a big city to find legitimate visibility.

How does class affect the lives of LGBTQ folks in these areas?

Working class and poor rural communities require citizen solidarity to weather the neglect and marginalization from the nation-state. In this environment, LGBTQ people must be seen primarily as "locals" and risk too much advocating for their concerns as queer folks because familiarity, not difference, ensures one's access to basic necessities.

Beyond churches, there are few resources available in rural communities to cover these basics should one's family be unable or unwilling to provide them. The fact that rural queer youth feel they have to choose speaks to the assumption that queerness not only resides in urban settings, but only comes with social and economic mobility.

According to the 2000 Census, rural America is 82 percent white. How do queer people of color navigate their personal and political alliances in a space of overlapping marginalization?

Queer youth of color are doubly estranged and, if they openly identify as queer, have more to risk. While parallels drawn by white peers or allies between the civil rights and LGBTQ rights movements might help young people of color feel more connected to LGBTQ activism, this uncritical argument also creates dissonance. As one young African American man named Brandon noted, he could see the connections between the two movements, but ultimately felt a greater responsibility to be a leader among students of color because that's where his community was.

For Brandon, the internet introduced another layer to racial divisions. He went online to find other bi- or gay-identifying men in his region and found almost exclusively white men, some of whom spoke about their desire in ways that struck Brandon as incredibly racist. While Brandon still felt the internet was an important part of allowing him to feel his desire for other men was normal, it also demonstrated how hard it would be for him to synthesize his racial and sexual identities.

How is the internet used by rural queer youth to shape or reinforce one's own queer identification?

The internet's value to rural queer youth identification can't be understated, but its impact cuts both ways. The internet offers an opportunity to explore queer identifications and search for other youth in the area, but it also make things more difficult by homogenizing what LGBTQ life and people are like and erasing the rural from the picture of queer life.

The internet also gives ideas for organizing politically that have no viability in rural communities. A door-to-door voter registration drive for LGBTQ issues won't work in a place where people don't see LGBTQ issues as a local concern.

What should national organizations do to re-center rural queer youth needs in the larger gay rights movement?

We need to re-examine our assumption that rural places are endemically hostile to queer folks. The frequency of hate crimes in cities should signal to us that rural and urban spaces are differently [but] not more or less violent to queer people. Without rural communities and their LGBTQ constituents, national and statewide advocacy groups will be unable to advance basic civil rights issues on a national scale.

Assuming LGBTQ life necessarily improves through securing the right to marry without equally valuing, and in rural communities prioritizing, accessible LGBTQ-specific healthcare and job protections will do very little to change the lives of working class and poor rural LGBTQ youth. Anyone who thinks rural queer kids are just a wedding ring away from full citizenship and equality hasn't spent time looking for healthcare or a living wage in rural Appalachia.

Your research was rooted in uncovering best practices for rural queer youth organizing. What strategies did you find?

The importance of coalitional politics in rural communities and the need to prioritize the "localness" of an issue is crucial. In some cases, gay-straight alliances will work, but human dignity student clubs that address homophobia alongside other discrimination may work better to build community support. The argument that non-LGBTQ folks should care about LGBTQ issues like marriage equality because it's "the right thing to do" misses the complicated meaning of marriage and families to people who depend on those institutions for both material and symbolic support.

For more information, visit:

http://queercountry.fromthesquare.org/

Larry Kramer's latest: keep gender away from gay studies

The always provocative, occasionally astute Larry Kramer used the occasion of a Yale gay alumni event to blast the university for "misusing" a grant from his brother made in his honor, by building up a gender studies program rather than focusing on the study of gay (apparently male) history.  Following are comments on the speech, from Inside Higher Ed. After the jump is Kramer's speech in its entirety.

HT: Minna Kotkin

...The speech caused a bit of confusion [at Yale] because that university's history department has two big-name gay studies scholars who write gay history: George Chauncey and Joanne Meyerowitz. So the idea that literary theorists control gay studies at Yale in a way that diminishes gay history bothers people there and elsewhere. Via e-mail, Chauncey said that the program named for Kramer did end after five years, but that it ended "as planned, when the funding did," and that it left gay studies "much stronger than it had been before."

Added Chauncey: "I teach courses at Yale every year on lesbian and gay history, and I share Larry Kramer's belief in the importance of gay history, even though we often disagree in our interpretation of that history. But LGBT studies is an interdisciplinary field which includes much more than history, and I am proud that the program at Yale offers courses in anthropology, sociology, film, literature, musicology, and other disciplines." Of the link between gay studies and gender studies, Chauncey said that "this is a common pattern across the country, and it seems to me a very good one, since as a curricular matter there are so many links between LGBT studies and gender studies."

John G. Younger, a gay studies scholar who is professor of classics and director of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Kansas, called Kramer's talk "rambling" and "shrill," and said he disagreed with it. Kramer's list of famous dead gay people is "not history, that's wish fulfillment," said Younger. He said that Kramer takes "such an essentialist view," when "since we're dealing with people, there's always nuance."

Defining people as gay doesn't make sense, Younger said, without some understanding of their cultures and identities and values....

New this week in SSRN: "Getting class"

Getting Class, a new essay by Laura Kessler (Utah Law),  grows out of the ClassCrits Working Group at Buffalo and revisits problems that arise from feminism's rejection of the claim that economic relations are the root of all social relations:  Here's the abstract:

Gender-based economic inequality has been a longstanding concern of feminist legal theory, particularly as it affects middle-class women. Yet much legal feminist literature remains uninterested in class analysis. How, then, can a focus on class build on and add to feminist legal theory projects? This Essay is intended to initiate a conversation around that question, more than to provide fully formed theories, strategies, or answers. The first part of this Essay briefly provides some examples of insufficient attention to class in legal feminism and other left critical theories in law. The second part explores five possible strategies for overcoming this problem, taking an intersectional approach. I choose my examples from employment discrimination and family law, but the analysis may well apply to other areas.

The religious and class divide on sexuality: attitudes vs behavior

The New Yorker

By Margaret Talbot

...Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some 3400 thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health.

Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. ... But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début”—to use the festive term of social-science researchers—shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier. ...

The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. ... More than half of those who take such pledges—which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian—end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse.

This summer's top 10 SSRN Sexuality and Law downloads

SSRN Top Downloads

1. Of Authorship and Audacity: An Empirical Study of Gender Disparity and Privilege in the 'Top Ten' Law Reviews
Minna J. Kotkin, Brooklyn Law School

2. Conflicts of Fundamental Rights as Constitutional Dilemmas
Lorenzo Zucca, King's College London School of Law

3. One of These Laws is Not Like the Others: Why the Federal Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act Raises New Constitutional Questions
Corey Rayburn Yung, John Marshall Law School, Chicago

4. Sex, Law and Consent
Robin L. West, Georgetown University Law Center

5. Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations
Martha T. McCluskey, University at Buffalo - Law School

6. The Criminalization of HIV: Time for an Unambiguous Rejection of the Use of Criminal Law to Regulate the Sexual Behavior of Those with and at Risk of HIV
Scott Burris, Edwin Cameron, Michaela Clayton; Temple University - James E. Beasley School of Law, High Court of the Republic of South Africa, AIDS and Rights Alliance of Southern Africa

7. Empowerment or Estrangement? Liberal Feminism's Vision of the 'Progress' of Muslim Women
Cyra Akila Choudhury, Florida International University College of Law

8. ICANN Can: Contracts and Porn Sites - Choosing 'to Play Internet Ball in American Cyberspace'
Cheryl B. Preston, Brent A. Little; Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

9. The Internet and Pornography: What if Congress and the Supreme Court Had Been Comprised of Techies in 1995-1997?
Cheryl B. Preston, Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School

10. Differential Power in Intact Same-Sex Families Based on Legal and Cultural Understandings of Parentage
Deirdre M. Bowen, Seattle University - School of Law

Social construction of harassment

A new study in Law & Social Inquiry shows that how people define sexual harassment is directly related to the extent to which they view sexual harassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to workplace norms.

Justine E. Tinkler of Louisiana State University used data from a nationwide study of sexual harassment in the United States' federal workplace to investigate how policy knowledge, attitudes about the legal regulation of sexual harassment, and the social locations and experiences of employees affect their likelihood to label uninvited sexual teasing as sexual harassment.

How men and women define sexual harassment is related to the degree towhich they view sexualharassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to the workplace.

Women, particularly women supervisors, resist defining sexual joking or remarks as harassment. This may be due to the fact that women recognizethat taking less serious forms of unwanted sexual attention too seriously can have negative effects on the way women are perceived.

Men with college or postgraduate degrees were significantly less likely to define sexual jokes or remarks as harassment than were men with a high school degree or less.

Among people whose workplace norms are threatened by anti-harassment enforcement, workplace training magnifies their resistance to defining sexual joking as harassment.

"By locating variation in how people define injurious behavior in both the content of the law, the social status of the groups it aims to protect, and how people think about its regulation, future research may be better equipped to understand why some laws never change the social order while others have an enormous impact," Tinkler concludes.

This study is published in the June 2008 issue of Law & Social Inquiry.

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courtesy of clinicians with not enough to do

More on the complexities of consent

See Robin West's important new article Download west_consent.pdf critiquing the legitimation function that consent plays for liberal understandings of sex and law. West defends consent as the border between criminal and non-criminal sex, but argues that relying solely on this line can render political and normative critique invisible. She focuses her analysis on unwanted, unwelcome consensual sex, and calls on legal theorists for pay more attention to consensual sexual harms and their relation to law.

In general, my own work has tended more to critique the over-regulation of sexual practices. In a fairly infamous British case cited by the Supreme Court in Lawrence, known as the Spanner case, what had clearly been consensual S&M practices were found to be properly criminalized. I find the critique of the uniqueness that Anglo-American law has traditionally assigned to issues involving sexuality (think obscenity as a category outside First Amendment protection) to be largely persuasive. Robin and I have had different emphases in our work, but I think we largely agree on where the important lines should be drawn. And my respect for the quality of her scholarship is enormous.