Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyJuly 17th, 2012
Oh, time to panic. Thomson Reuters is the latest company to come out against Minnesota’s proposed marriage amendment:
We believe the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, if passed, would limit our ability to recruit and retain top talent. For this reason, we do not believe that the Amendment would be good for Thomson Reuters or the business community in the state.
Maggie Gallagher and NOM have pounced on this, presumably because they know more about running a business than the people who run businesses, and they rebut Reuters with:
…nine out of ten of the top states for business (according to a new CNBC ranking) have marriage amendments [banning same-sex marriage].
I’ve previously taken a swipe at NOM’s ludicrous and simplistic analysis. Business climate depends on a myriad of factors (tax policy? cheap labor?) and no one claims that marriage equality alone will wholly determine a state’s ranking. I even pointed out that 4 of the 5 healthiest states recognize same-sex marriage — which, if you credit this sort of flawed analysis, should make our opponents think twice before crying out that we’re promoting an unhealthy homosexual lifestyle.
But Maggie has inexplicably ignored my advice (I’m hurt, Maggie, hurt) and she keeps promoting this ridiculous proof-by-ranking analysis. So I decided to do a little ranking of my own.
Wikipedia has categorized the 50 states according to their marriage laws. I compared those groups based on:
Guess how those rankings turned out:
I swear, those were the only three measures I checked. The results were remarkably consistent and the conclusion is obvious: same-sex marriage increases income and lowers poverty.
Wait — no, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t say that at all. Real life is much more complicated, and correlation is not causation. Probably what’s going on here is that factors (like education) which lead to higher income are also correlated with support for marriage equality. Just as opposition to marriage equality is correlated with the same conservative demographic that creates a pro-business economic climate.
Think of it like this: Men are more likely than women to arm wrestle drunk and to get testicular cancer. That doesn’t mean drunk arm wrestling causes testicular cancer, just that it’s correlated with it.
But NOM isn’t going to make fine logical distinctions like that. Or even broad ones. And they’re certainly not going to give up their silly ranking argument. So I have to wonder: how will they respond to this? I’d love to hear NOM’s steel-trap brainiacs: “Uh, we said marriage amendments are good for businesses, not for people. Oh, and businesses are people. So there!”
But that’s a pipe dream. We’d never hear anything so honest from NOM.
Note: To get these figures, I simply averaged the numbers for each group of states, without weighting the states by population. For the purposes of this faux-analysis, the number of people in each state did not matter, or any other factor except each state’s marriage law.
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mikenola
July 17th, 2012
The CNBC survey results are here http://www.cnbc.com/id/46413849
It is sortable by the headings.
a few interesting things to look at.
of the top 10 sorted by Cost of Business:
EDUCATION- NONE are in the top 10, 2 are in the top 20 and 7 are in the bottom 20, one is in in the bottom 30.
Only 1 state is in the top 10 for WORKFORCE (which means people ready to actually do the available jobs)
Only 2 are in the top 10 for quality of life (5 are in the bottom 20, 3 are in the middle-ish)
only 2 are in the Top 10 for economic stability.
for transportation only 1 is in the top 10 for that same group. The other 9 are 23rd to 48th.
for Business friendliness only 2 are in the top 10, 1 more is in the top 20, the rest are in the bottom 10.
Access to Capital, 10 are in the bottom 15, 1 is in the top 17.
Cost of Living, 4 are in the top 10 cheapest places to live,
Quality of Life, 2 states are in the top 10. of the other 8 they rank 18,19,22,37,43,44,45 & 50th. (this means only 2 are decent places to live.)
To summarize this: In the top 10 states ranked for Cost of Business the populations are dumber, poorer, generally less trained and available to work, have less access to transportation and infrastructure to get to work.
these same 10 states, though cheap, are not Business Friendly, have less access to Capital and rank lower in access to Technology and Innovation.
The good news for them is that about half are relatively CHEAP to live.
Oh an a fact not on the chart but relevant. Of the same top 10, 9 are in the highest per capita ratio of government subsistence payments.
that is a much more interesting view of that survey data.
Timothy Kincaid
July 17th, 2012
Well gosh I guess that proves it. Someone call the Fortune 500 companies… oh, wait, most already support equality.
Well then get Grover Norquist on the line.. oh, he does too.
Well damn, Maggie, it’s not your happy day, is it?
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