Spring 2005

With This Ring: Marrying Research & Changing Families

by Eugenia Smith

As Americans and their elected officials debate gay marriage, social scientist Kathleen Hull is asking tough questions to help move the debate beyond gut reactions.

"So how do you feel about gay marriage?” The question hangs in the air. A few students fidget, frown, shrug, or roll their eyes. Most (roughly 85 percent) “wonder what all the fuss is about,” says their professor, Kathleen Hull. But ask those same students about other “alternative” family systems—arranged marriages, for example— and they disapprove. So what gives?

“Most of my students say, ‘Why shouldn’t people in love get married?’” says Hull. “They also think nobody should be coerced into marrying someone they don’t love. But if arranged marriage was standard practice in our society, they might think about it differently.”

Hull is quick to remind her students that marriage negotiations in societies with arranged marriages have a kind of counterpart in cyberdating culture, where people market themselves to potential partners by listing selling points—presenting something like an online version of a dowry. How is this up-front transaction so different from itemizing your daughter’s assets to secure a husband?

These are the kinds of questions that Hull, an assistant professor of sociology, raises in her undergraduate class “Love, Sex, and Marriage.” In matters of courtship and marriage, there are no absolutes, says Hull. What is unthinkable in one culture or demographic group is perfectly acceptable in another. It’s all socially patterned.

Calling herself a cultural sociologist, Hull focuses on “how people understand the social world around them, and how that understanding plays out in social relationships.” These days, she is studying how marriage as a cultural model or practice intersects with marriage as a legal and political institution. And she ’s interested in how American social norms not only drive public policy but also are reflected in people’s attitudes, choices, and behavior.

Hull hopes that her research will “bring a more rational, evidence- based voice to very emotional discussions” of such hotbutton issues as gay marriage.

Tolerance and affirmation

Hull began her research on same-sex relationships as a Ph.D. student in 1995, as debates over gay marriage heated up nationwide. She asked 71 people in same-sex couples about their views of marriage as a cultural and legal model for partnership recognition. She has brought what she learned from this and subsequent research to her explorations of and engagement with the broader policy debates.

To fully understand the furor around gay marriage, says Hull, we need to understand the question that lies at the heart of the public debate—whether gays and lesbians should be accorded not just legal rights but full social and legal inclusion. “For most people, gay marriage is not a narrow legal or constitutional question,” she explains. “It’s more value-laden than that.

“Sizable majorities say they favor equal rights such as access to housing and jobs. They may even support domestic partnership recognition—but many balk at ‘marriage rights.’ Marriage, they say, is qualitatively different from just having a law that says you cannot fire or evict someone for being gay. To them, marriage goes beyond mere tolerance to some kind of positive affirmation, full social and legal citizenship, if you will.”

Civil unions receive broader support than same-sex marriage, Hull notes, but the two are difficult to disentangle. For social scientists, there ’s a clear line between marriage as a sacred institution and marriage as a state-approved legal union. But for most Americans, that line is pretty blurry.

“Religious officials are deputized by the state to officiate at weddings and sanction marriages as legal relationships,” Hull explains, “so people have trouble separating the religious and civil dimensions.”

Even for people professing no active religious affiliation, dominant cultural practices prevail when it comes to questions of marriage and family, Hull observes: “When a cleric officiates, the message is that this is a serious, legitimate spiritual commitment.”

Individuals, couples, families

Despite the broad support for gay rights generally, for many Americans the sticking point is support for the rights of couples, says Hull.

“Gay rights is generally understood as a citizenship issue; it’s about individuals. But marriage is about couples, as romantic, emotional family units,” she explains. “It’s about about relationships—and so it’s sexually loaded, just too close to the bedroom.”

In other words, it’s OK to be gay, as long as you don’t practice being gay, or openly participate in a gay relationship.“It’s one thing to say a gay coworker shouldn’t be fired for being gay,” says Hull. It’s another to confront the fact that she or he shares a household and a bed with a same-sex partner.”

Throw parenting into the mix, and the debate is even more highly charged.

“There ’s research supposedly demonstrating that kids do best when raised by a mother and a father,” says Hull. But that research generally compares children raised in stable two-parent heterosexual homes with children raised in troubled homes or by divorced or single parents.

“When data are manipulated to make a point or raise alarms, we need to ask whether it’s good social science,” Hull cautions. “Solid research—work that controls variables and that directly compares kids raised by same-sex parents to kids raised by heterosexual parents—reveals no significant developmental differences, whether in school performance or psychosocial adjustment.”

What’s at stake

Beyond issues of religious affirmation and social acceptance, gay couples have an enormous stake in policies governing health coverage, family and bereavement leave, pensions, and inheritance rights. “Heterosexual married couples take certain things for granted,” says Hull. “They never have to ask, ‘Am I legally entitled to make decisions for my incapacitated partner?’ ‘Will I lose our house if my partner dies and I have to pay inheritance tax because I’m not a legal spouse?’

“They haven’t had to consider the reality of a woman’s being barred from the critical care unit to see her gravely ill life partner because she’s not ‘family.’ Or a man’s having to take vacation time to care for or mourn the death of his lifelong companion.”

At the core of American beliefs about marriage and family is the assumption that the normative American model—husband, wife, a kid or two—is natural and universal, says Hull. “But the assumption of an unchanging reality is not supported by the historical record,” Hull says, noting that history is rife with variations in courtship and marriage, including changes in gender roles, in how many and what kinds of partners are permissible, even in the importance of love.

“The experience of falling in love is nothing new, of course, but the idea of romantic love as the basis for marriage—that’s actually a pretty recent phenomenon,” says Hull.

Toward critical thinking

What the social sciences contribute to the public debate is an understanding of the extent to which our beliefs and practices are “contingent on our location in the social world,” says Hull. There is little real consensus across cultures and generationsabout which sexual practices and family configurations are “normal and natural.” And as our society changes, variations are more pronounced than ever.

As Hull’s students examine different forms of courtship and marriage, they begin to sort out the social patterning that underlies their reactions. “Take polygamy, for example. My students overwhelmingly disapprove,” Hull says. “I ask them to think about where their reactions come from. Why do they think that one form of multiple partnership, serial monogamy, is OK, but polygamy is not? American social norms, that’s why.”

Such provocative questions push students to “go beyond their gut reactions to issues,” Hull says. Their attitudes may or may not change; but they learn to think critically about why they believe what they do. Getting gut reactions into better alignment with good research and informed understanding could help move the public debate to less acrimonious ground, if not consensus.

Perspective grounded in research

Hull is in a long-term committed relationship with a woman. So does that mean her research is biased? No more or less than any other researcher, she declares emphatically.

“Why even ask the question? There ’s an implicit assumption that heterosexual researchers are not biased by their own sexual identity,” says Hull. “All people—including people right in the mainstream—see the world from a particular social location, a perspective determined by their cultural and personal history.” For a social scientist such as Hull, that perspective is grounded in solid research as well as personal history.

Last year, Hull testified at the state capitol against a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. “When I provide such testimony,” she says, “I’m not there to push a personal agenda. I’m there to provide good information. I’m there as an advocate for sound public policy, doing what I can to ensure that legislation is based on good scientific data.”

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