There is a legimate conversation to be had about marriage equality in the U.S. and beyond. Not only about what kind of society we are and how we recognize bonds between people, but how do provide equity based on civil rights and not religious constructions.
But discredited researcher Mark Regnerus, whose so-called family study purported to find children raised by same-sex couples had a host of social issues as a result, has a new argument. While talking to Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio (yeah, the Steubenville famous for the rape of a young high school woman by two of the town's football players), Regnerus wandered through a bizarre fantasy lecture about how men and women have a sexual economy which underpins marriage by creating value of women.
Then he says (for the specific clip hop over to Jeremy Hooper's Good As You blog here):
"If gay marriage is perceived as legitimate by heterosexual women, it will eventually embolden boyfriends everywhere — and not a few husbands — to press for what men have always historically wanted but were rarely allowed: sexual novelty in the form of permission to stray without jeopardizing their primary relationship. Discussion of openness in sexual partners in straight marriages will become more common, just as the practice of heterosexual anal sex got a big boost from the normalization of gay men's sexual behavior in both contemporary porn and in the American imagination."
Say what?
For an academic who is supposedly an expert (and slated to testify in support of keeping Michigan's marriage ban next week) on sexual relations and relationships in America he seems quite uninformed.
In March of 2011 the CDC released the National Health Statistics Report, Number 36, which puts a lie to Regnerus' anal sex fears. According to that report, 44 percent of men ages 25 to 44 and 36 percent of women in the same age group had anal sex at least once in their lifetime. Hardly anything to do with gay people or pornography. The study concluded there was no "clear cut pattern" for anal sex among opposite sex partners.
Perhaps the increase in anal sex might have something to do with the failed chastity movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. The Sexuality Information and Education Council (SIECUS) reports that a 2005 study of chastity participants found the males in such programs were four times more likely to have engaged in anal sex.
So maybe, just maybe, the Christian Taliban can stop pointing their fingers at queer folks for the sexual activity straight people are enjoying and, you know, not cast the first stone? Yeah, that'll happen.
