Mapping the Future of Gay Marriage

Yesterday, same-sex marriage in Iowa was rendered legal by that state's Supreme Court (two days after it was made legal in Sweden). The United States seems inexorably headed towards marriage rights for gay couples - but how long will it take to get there across the board? Nate Silver has an answer. Based entirely on his hard work at fivethirtyeight.com, here is the future of gay marriage in the US:



The years indicated are those by which a gay marriage ban would be defeated by voters in a given state, according to a regression model designed by Silver. (Again, all the math and hard work is Silver's; I just made the map.)

How did Silver come up with these results? Here's the explanation:

I looked at the 30 instances in which a state has attempted to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage by voter initiative. The list includes Arizona twice, which voted on different versions of such an amendment in 2006 and 2008, and excludes Hawaii, which voted to permit the legislature to ban gay marriage but did not actually alter the state's constitution. I then built a regression model that looked at a series of political and demographic variables in each of these states and attempted to predict the percentage of the vote that the marriage ban would receive.

It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:

1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.

These variables collectively account for about three-quarters of the variance in the performance of marriage bans in different states. The model predicts, for example, that a marriage ban in California in 2008 would have passed with 52.1 percent of the vote, almost exactly the fraction actually received by Proposition 8.

The more religious a state is, and the more white evangelicals it has, the higher the percentage of voters who would be likely to support a gay marriage ban. However, according to Silver marriage bans "are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we'd project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year." So it's possible to extrapolate, given the current religious demographics of a state and the trend of decreasing support for bans, when a gay marriage ban would fail.

There are 11 states where a marriage ban would already be expected to fail: all of New England and New York, plus several states in the West (all of which are among the least religious states in the country). California wouldn't be likely to reject a ban until next year. (Side note: despite California's status as a sort of poster boy for social liberalism, most of the Northeast tends to be more liberal on these kinds of social indicators.)

Over the next couple of years, majority opposition to gay marriage bans will spread quickly through the Northeastern and Western states, then through the Midwest - claiming a majority of all states by 2013 - and finally through the South, with Mississippi bringing up the rear in 2024.

Of course, history rarely moves in a straight line, and there's a big element of speculation in simply extrapolating from current trends. As Silver notes, a backlash against gay marriage might mount, delaying or reversing the trends that have been evident over the past few years; or by a sudden gestalt shift gay marriage might find broad acceptance. What seems much more likely than the precise dates given here, though, is the chronology of the geographical spread of acceptance. Same-sex marriages are already legal in the New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, with the Vermont legislature recently voting overwhelmingly to allow it (though the Governor may veto the bill [UPDATE: the legislature overrode the veto, so Vermont is the fourth state to make gay marriage legal, and the first to do so legislatively rather than judicially]). And even among states where gay marriage bans have passed, some of the most narrow margins were in Western states like Oregon, Colorado, Arizona and, of course, California. Meanwhile, it is certain that the South will be the last region in the country to become amenable to gay marriage.

As for Iowa? According to Silver, an amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage in that state would require passage in two consecutive sessions of the state legislature, and then would have to be ratified by the voters. So it couldn't come up for a vote at the ballot box until at least 2012. According to Silver's regression model, such a ban might pass in Iowa until 2013 - but who knows; maybe 3 years of being neighbors with happily married gay couples without having their social fabric torn asunder will cause Iowans' tolerance clock to speed up just a bit.

5/19/09 UPDATE: This map was never intended as a prediction of when gay marriage would actually become legal. But it is interesting that, as of a month and a half later, gay marriage is now legal in 4 states (MA, CT, VT, ME), will soon be legal in a 5th (NH; just waiting for a technicality in the bill to be worked out), and is making progress in a 6th state (NY) which, according to Nate S., would vote against a hypothetical gay marriage ban as of this year. In other words, gay marriage may actually be legal in at least half of these 11 states by the time the year is out, and will definitely be legal in at least 5 - plus Iowa, of course. Again, the point was never that these would be the dates by which gay marriage would actually be legal - but it almost seems to be turning out that way, to some extent.

The Atheist Map of the UK

The Guardian has an interactive map of religious belief - or the lack thereof - in the UK.



The map is based on a survey by the think tank Theos which polled respondents on their beliefs about human origins. The map indicates the percentage of the population who agree with the proposition that 'evolution removes the need for God.' The map gives stats for each region of the country; the pie chart on the left is for the Eatern region - the most atheistic region of the country, where fully 4 out of 9 people say that evolution obviates a religious explanation for the existence of life.

Here are the regions of the country ranked by lack of religiosity:
1. Eastern - where 44% agree that 'evolution removes the need for God'
2. Southwest - 40%
2. Southeast - 40%
4. Northeast - 39%
5. Yorks and Humber - 38%
5. East Midlands - 38%
7. Northwest - 36%
7. West Midlands - 36%
9. Scotland - 34%
10. Wales - 32%
11. London - 31%
12. Northern Ireland - 28%

London's low ranking is a bit of a shocker. Could it be the large immigrant population there importing beliefs from more devout corners of the globe?

It's interesting to compare this map to the map of atheism in the US. The most obvious thing to note is that the US is way more religious than the UK. The two maps aren't 100% comparable. In fact, neither map directly depicts self-reported atheists as such: the US map shows "non-religious" population, and this UK map shows those who choose belief in evolution over belief in God, when given the choice. But those are both pretty good proxies for atheism/agnosticism. And a comparison shows that the most religious regions of the UK barely approach the least religious regions of the US: only the states of Vermont (34%) and New Hampshire (29%) have more non-believers than the most religious region of the UK, Northern Ireland (28%).

But none of that is too surprising. What I find more interesting is a possible correlation between the UK and the US. The most religious regions of the UK are Scotland and Northern Ireland. Those happen to be the source regions for the Scots-Irish who populated the the American South as early as the early 18th Century and contributed much to the development of the culture of that region, which is now the most religious in the US. Of course, the South is far more religious than Northern Ireland or Scotland is today; but could the relative strength of religion in these areas within the context of their broader societies be causally related? Is it a function of that centuries-old cultural kinship? It seems possible.

The Atheist Map of America

A new survey shows that the US is growing less religious; USA Today maps it.



It's an interactive map that lets you plot the percentages of the states' populations that are Catholic, other Christian, other religions, or belong to no religion for both 1990 and 2008. This image shows the non-religious populations as of 2008.

They're a much larger percentage of the population than they were even one generation ago: 15%, compared to 8% in 1990. That makes them a larger bloc than every other group except Catholics and Baptists. In 1990, fewer than 10% of the population was non-religious in 36 states, not counting Alaska and Hawaii (the least important states, according to this and many other maps); by 2008, that was the case in just 6 states. Oregon was the least religious state in 1990, with 18% claiming no religion; there are now a dozen states above 20%. These numbers are pretty remarkable.

The geographic distribution of non-religion is pretty unsurprising. States in New England and the West are the least religious; states in the South and the Plains are the most religious. The least religious state in the country is now Vermont, where a full 34% of people claim no religion, up from 13% in 1990. At the other end of the spectrum, just 5% of Mississippians claim no religion. Overall, the percentage of the population that calls itself Christian has shrunk by 11%

Jain Geography

Here's something completely different:



It's a Jaina portrayal of the world, from an exhibit at the Library of Congress. According to the exhibit's website

Jainism has its own version of geography and cosmology. This chart from the nineteenth century shows the world of human habitation as a central continent with mountain ranges and rivers, surrounded by a series of concentric oceans (with swimmers and fish) and ring-shaped continents.

Indeed, that Jain cosmology and geography they speak of is a trip. Sez Wikipedia, the early Jains divided the universe into three parts: the heavens or realms of the gods (Urdhva Loka), the realms of the humans (Madhya Loka), and the realms of the hellish beings (Adho Loka). So the image above is a depiction of Madhya Loka, the realms of the humans.

Madhya Loka consists of at least eight continent-islands, arranged concentrically, each of which is surrounded by an ocean (typically with some sort of succulent name, like "Sugar Ocean" or "Ocean of Milk"); you can see those continent-rings clearly on this map (though why only two?). Humans live on Jambudvipa, the island at the center of the world; and at the center of Jambudvipa is Mount Meru, the highest point and center of the world. (According to trusty ol' Wikipedia, the quasi-mythical Mount Meru corresponds to the real world's Nagard Sarovar, in the middle of the Pamir Mountains.) At the summit of Mount Meru is Brahmapuri, the great city of Brahma, the god of creation.

From carbon dioxide emissions to eastern cosmology without so much as a segue. You see? You see why maps are so fun?

Abrahamic vs. Dharmic Religions

This is interesting. I don't usually think of world religions in these sorts of binomial terms. (Purple indicates areas where the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam predominate; yellow represents the Dharmic religions - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, etc.)



Sometimes, late in the broadcast of a sporting event, the sportscasters, feeling themselves bereft of things to say, will latch onto a notion. They will repeat this notion, over and over, each reinforcing the other's expression of this notion, in a sort of self-catalyzing reaction that causes them rapidly to take the originally reasonable idea in a decidedly ad absurdum vector. Such a phenomenon was in progress when I tuned into the last ten minutes of the college football championship the other night.

Turns out there's a football player by the name of Tim Tebow who was playing that night. And, according to Fox's sportscasters, Tim Tebow is a Good Man. They were very impressed at how Good a man he was and, they assured the audience, we all would be likewise impressed. Astounded even. In fact, they quickly led themselves into reporting, he might well be one of the finest young men in the world. He had been home-schooled. He was deeply religious. At one point during their encomium, this Tebow made sort of a churlish gesture toward an opposing player, and one of the announcers was moved to speculate that "that might have been the first bad thing he's ever done!" Now, I've never met this Tebow guy. But I feel comfortable in asserting that, if he is indeed a human being, that that was not the first bad thing Tebow'd ever done. I mean, by this point, by the sheer fervor of their moral judgment about the kid - positive though the judgment was - the announcers had pretty thoroughly deprived the poor kid (who had 'John 3:16' marked in white against the black of his smeared-on eyeshade) of his humanity.

One of their main bits of evidence that Tebow was of unmitigatedly hearty moral fiber was that he'd been on several missions to convert the natives of various countries around the world. So now my question is: really? Is missionary work still considered morally righteous by a mainstream-enough slice of the American public that Fox sports announcers can take such a view for granted on the air? Why, these announcers were acting as if they weren't even remotely familiar with postcolonial theory!

Now, I'll grant that if your are a Christian Dominionist or absolutist, then obviously you'd view (Christian) missionary work as morally righteous. But such a moral worldview is also antithetical to living in a plural society and, indeed, a plural world; whereas, if you believe that other cultures and religions have their own unique integrity, and the diversity of humanity's religious expressions is a part of our legacy that ought to be treasured, it's hard for me to see how you can regard missionaryin' the heathens as a worthy pursuit.

In other words, it seems like we still have a ways to go until the values of pluralism and cosmopolitanism can really be considered ascendant in this society.

This Wikipedia page has some more fun religion maps.