Good News! More Sex; Less Lies. A new
Centers for Disease Control survey of American men finds that
more men say they are having sex with other men than in the 1980s.
As Reuters reports:
surveys collected since 1996 showed between 3.1% and 3.7% of men reported having sex with another man during the past year. This is a sizeable jump from 1988 estimates of between 1.7% and 2% "
Of course, this 3.1% to 3.7% of American maledom should be viewed as a minimum baseline, since many MHSWM (men having sex with men) won't admit it. In the words of the CDC's Dr. John E. Anderson, who co-authored the report: "Male-to-male sex is still a sensitive, stigmatized behavior, and...is likely to be underreported to some unknown degree. Even though these recent estimates are somewhat higher than other surveys, they probably are still low." No kidding. (Plus, the survey wasn't intended to count those gay people who don't happen to be sexually active.)
Another survey finding: attitudes about the acceptability of
same-sex activity have also improved:
between 1996 and 2000, up to 34% of survey respondents said they believed homosexuality was generally not wrong, while only 24% of people who completed the survey between 1988 and 1994 had similar attitudes toward same-sex activity.
Can anyone doubt that these trends will continue to do anything but rise, with significant socio-political ramifications for issues such as same-sex unions?
Breaking Up Really Is Hard to Do.
Couples who were legally united via a civil union in Vermont are
finding they can't dissolve their unions if they reside in other
states, leaving them in a kind of legal limbo as regards
inheritance rights and other matters. One of the problems: the
federal Defense of Marriage Act and similar state statutes, which
state courts interpret as barring them from ruling on same-sex
union matters. As the
Washington Post reports:
Outside of Vermont, civil unions are not recognized, so they cannot be ended. ... The U.S. Constitution's "full faith and credit" clause requires states to recognize "public acts, records and judicial proceedings" from other states, but the courts have never applied that to same-sex unions.
This problem will only get worse as more couples united in
Vermont later seek to disentangle themselves. The answer is for
other states, at the very least, to recognize Vermont civil unions
as a legal contract. But that would mean they'd have to stop
stigmatizing gay couples, of course.
--Stephen H. Miller