A Researcher Behind the Supreme Court’s Decision to Legalize Same-sex Marriage

Bowling Green is home to a large social science department that has played a pivotal role in social equality recently. The ruling by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 ruled that states must allow same sex couples to marry. Bowling Green is home of the social scientist that lead the review of the studies that supported this ruling.

Manning believes the family is of the utmost importance in creating a healthy society. She believes that understanding the situation that creates bad outcomes for families is pivotal in enacting interventions to improve outcomes.

“The family is a core socializing unit, also a core unit that cares for our elderly and young children in the United states. It is a very important institution to study when you’re interested in learning about the wellbeing of youth and adults.”

Wendy Manny is a Distinguished Professor at the University and is a family demographer. She is the Director of the Center for Family and Demographic Research (which is an NIH funded family well being research center in Bowling Green) and Co-Director for the National Center for Family & Marriage Research. She earned her PHD from the university of Wisconsin and received her post doc at Penn state. She chose BG for the large amount of population science research happening when she came here in 1999.

Manning is widely interested in the many societal forces changing what we consider family, and just one of those forces is changing religious views.

“We are becoming less and less religious as a nation. And a lot of religions are opening their doors to wider groups of people and not being as, maybe, judgmental or dismissive of members of their groups who are not living what would be considered the typical American family.”

Manning saw no reason to instantiate policy for claims about child outcome that were not corroborated by science. Some of the metrics on childhood outcomes are reported, for instance, by teachers and parents on how likely the child is, for one example, to have an angry outburst. While this may seem trivial, self-reported incidents like outbursts can be highly correlated to outcome — incidents like this being correlated to things such as future employment rates.

Manning was a part of the Amicus brief for the Supreme Court on same sex marriage legalization. Manning looked at the data on same sex partner’s children outcomes and interpreted it for the lawyers writing the legal brief to be given to the Supreme Court for the decision on federally legalizing same sex marriage. The main argument is that children adopted by same sex partners would not fare well because the parents would not have traditional family roles.

Manning acknowledges that there is research supporting greater parental investment in biological children than non-biological children. She says this makes little difference as only half of all children in the U.S. are currently living with biological parents, we can only figure out how to change the dynamic post hoc. This is a consequence of the nationally high divorce rate and in most instances, there is no way the biological parents will get back together, and even if they did this would likely lead to high at home instability for obvious reasons.

“One of the arguments against [same sex marriage] was that children are going to suffer, and they are going to have negative outcomes and the research did not indicate that at the time. Even to this day there isn’t research to support that.”

This ruling was one of the biggest social equality victories in the recent past, but there are still some states in the U.S. pushing back against the science and not allowing same sex couples to adopt.

“If someone is willing to put forward their love and effort to raise a child, we should embrace that effort because that is a wonderful thing.”

Originally published at brandondot.wordpress.com on August 13, 2018.