Marriages Made in Political Heaven

ROBERT REISCHAUER, Urban Institute: Welcome, I'm Bob Reischauer, the president of the Urban Institute, and today we are hosting the fifth in our 2004 First Tuesday series, which is a series designed to examine key domestic social policy issues and their place in this year's election. First Tuesdays traditionally are opportunities for the Urban Institute to share research findings that our scholars have been working on and to have commentary from outside experts and questions from the audience.

In the election year series we have chosen to have the commentary provided by individuals who have insight from the perspectives of the two major political parties. As all of you know, marriage and family issues have always provided rich fodder for political campaigns. Historically, politicians have always wanted to portray themselves as strong supporters of traditional family values and defenders of the traditional concept of marriage. However, as the demographic tectonic plates underlying our country have become more complex and shifted and divorce and out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation and other nontraditional living arrangements have become more prevalent, it's also become important for politicians to appear tolerant, if not supportive, of the diversity that has become America.

Some years ago, actress Shirley MacLaine was chatting with the wife of Sam Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul, and asked, you know, "What's it like to be married to the same man for over 35 years?" To this, Ms. Goldwyn replied, "It gets worse every day. (Laughter.) Thirty-five years ago I told Sam to come home and I'd fix him a sandwich for lunch and he's been coming home for lunch every day for 35 years." We hope that you won't find this session here wearing on you, but will find that it gives you a lot to chew on.

We have two researchers from the Urban Institute who will lead this off. First, Greg Acs, who is a senior research associate in the Income and Benefits Policy Center. Greg has worked for a number of years on trends in family living arrangements and the impact of those arrangements on the well-being of children. He is a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and one of his recent publications is included in your little packet.

Gary Gates is a research associate in the Urban Institute's Center on Labor and Human Services and Population, and he's a demographer by training and is coauthor of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas, which was just released a couple of days ago and has been noted in—it seems every newspaper in America, and gives a picture of the demography of gay and lesbian couples, both in the various states and in the 25 largest metropolitan areas.

When Greg and Gary have finished their presentations, we'll have the perspectives from the political side on what they have to say and on the larger issues of marriage and families in this election. Leading off will be Kellyanne Conway, who is CEO and president of The Polling Company and WomenTrend. She is a lawyer by training and serves on the board of diverse organizations such as the National Women's History Museum and the Young Republican National Federation, but most interesting, and I hope we hear something about it, is she's a founding member of—not just Right Now, but also Young Elephants PAC.

And finally, Anna Greenberg, who is the vice-president of Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research, will provide her perspective. She has been an important element in that firm's national polls for NPR and has been involved in numerous other political and issue campaigns for nonprofits and foundations as well as for political figures. Anna is a political scientist, I think, by training and taught at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

I should add that this session is going to be moderated by Wendy Swallow, who is an associate professor of journalism at American University—was staff writer on the financial desk of the Washington Post, but realized that was too hard of work and went to the University where she has been writing in recent years about divorce and remarriage. In 2001, her first book, called Breaking Apart, came out and her second book will be published next month and it will be entitled, The Triumph of Love over Experience. I guess from Samuel Johnson? No?

WENDY SWALLOW: Yes. Very good.

ROBERT REISCHAUER, Urban Institute: Okay. So while I'm on a roll here, I'll quit. (Laughter.)

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Really, that's excellent.

ROBERT REISCHAUER, Urban Institute: And I'll turn it over to Wendy for any opening remarks she might have.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Well, welcome. Until this year I really wouldn't have believed it was possible to politicize the topic of marriage any more than it had already been. Marriage seemed to actually be rebounding slightly form the divorce craze of the '70s and '80s. Out-of-wedlock births, particularly those among at-risk teens, seemed to be easing a bit. It looked like marriage might be able to move back into the privacy of the home where, of course, some of us believe that's where it should be, but no, that would have been too easy and certainly not as much fun as we're having today.

When thinking about the current national debate about marriage, I think it's important for all of us to stop for a minute and consider what it means to us individually. Most of us grew up in marriages, however short they may have been. Many of us have chosen to live portions of our adult lives in marriages. Most of us have dreams—fantasies—about marriage and think about what it should be like at its best, and then we go home and live with what it's like in its reality.

That reality is, in fact, the part about marriage that I find most interesting. I chose to step out of my own marriage as a young mother, and the moment I did I found myself in a completely foreign landscape that was not anything like what I had anticipated. So many things in my life changed that I never again felt like the majority, although in many respects I became more representative of my generation than I had been before. Some years after that, I chose to marry again, but this time I was taking on a step-family as well as a husband, and if you think divorce is a jolt, you should try remarriage. (Laughter.) It looks a lot like traditional marriage from the outside, but it isn't—and don't be fooled. The people who research remarriage will actually tell you that the faster you get over the illusion that remarriage is like a first marriage, the faster you can adjust and actually get on with some portion of happiness.

When the administration puts on its rose-colored glasses and promotes remarriage, particularly among single parents, I have to admit I get a little nervous. Remarriage challenges the most mature among us and most remarriages actually fail. In fact, three out of four remarriages with residential children, that is, kids that come in to live with the marriage, do not survive, and most of those break up in the first four years, which is very difficult for the children, obviously, who have been put through the experience.

Which brings us to the research before us today. The work that Greg and Gary will present adds several interesting pieces to the marriage debate that should help us understand the complex picture that is the modern marriage. Even Mavis Hetherington, who is one of the best respected researchers into the dynamics of divorce and remarriage, said that she found in her studies that families present so many different forms it can be difficult to actually do good research about them. In one long term study she was doing on stepfamilies, she told me she kept trying to cluster the families into types as a way of understanding them, but soon realized that every family was so idiosyncratic that it needed its own cluster.

The variables are staggering, especially when you're looking at remarriage. Are the parents widowed or divorced? Who brings children to the marriage and under what sort of custody arrangement? Do the kids live with the remarried couple or do they visit, or do some live with them and others come visit? The list goes on and on. Every family, as we all really know in our bones, creates its own version of heaven or hell. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to understand marriage better because it matters, particularly when it comes to child welfare.

So let's start with Greg.

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: Thank you. I'd like to begin with a controversial statement: Marriage promotion should not be controversial. Marriage as an institution should be right up there with mom and apple pie, and while it's true that there are moms like mommy dearest, Joan Crawford, and apple pie isn't exactly Atkins friendly, mom and apple pie are generally considered to be good and wholesome. So should it be with marriage.

Clearly, there are bad marriages marred by strife and abuse and these unhealthy marriages do no good for children, adults, or society. And of course there are countless examples of happy, healthy, nurturing nontraditional families, but on average the data are quite clear: children do better if they are raised by their two married, biological or adoptive parents. And married parents, especially men, tend to be happier, healthier, and more economically secure than unmarried individuals.

Marriage promotion initiatives are aimed at promoting healthy marriages by providing information about the benefits of marriage, funding programs that teach relationship skills, and reduce the financial penalties facing married couples in tax and transfer programs. Marriage promotion is not and should never be about things like banning divorce or penalizing unmarried parents.

The major impetus behind marriage promotion efforts is to improve the well-being of children and so I'm going to focus my remarks on the meaning of marriage for children. Children living with their two married biological parents are less likely to be poor, to exhibit behavioral problems, to struggle in school, and to engage in risky conduct than children in any other living arrangement, and this forms the strong prima fascia case for marriage. More specific information, like real numbers, appears in your packets.

Two questions dog marriage promotion initiatives. Can they actually increase marriage rates; and if so, how much will the well-being of children actually improve as a result? So the first question: can we promote marriage? We just don't know. Clearly there are some counseling and relationship skills programs that have shown promise, but we don't know if these programs can be implemented on a large scale or whether their success depends uniquely on the cadre of individuals running these programs in specific sites. We don't know whether the benefits of these programs generate widely to all population subgroups. For example, a counseling program that works very well for middle-class families may not work nearly as effectively for low-income couples, but we're trying to find out.

Indeed, the federal government is sponsoring a series of interventions and evaluations to determine what, if any, approaches to marriage promotion actually work. Now, in the interest of full disclosure, the Urban Institute is involved in some of these evaluations. These interventions include sponsoring programs aimed broadly at whole communities, more narrowly at low-income couples, and even specifically at unmarried couples at the time they have a child.

In some cases, like when a romantic couple already exists, it's easy to believe that interventions could help maintain and promote marriage. In other cases, say when there's a single mother who is no longer romantically involved with the child's father, finding a potential spouse is more problematic and in fact may not even be wise.

At any rate, if it turns out that these interventions can increase marriage, how much improvement can we expect to see in child well-being? Well, that largely depends on the extent to which there are inherent benefits to marriage. Now clearly there are substantial differences in the characteristics of married and unmarried parents. Married parents are more educated, they have better jobs, and they have higher incomes than unmarried parents. And these differences won't simply disappear if unmarried couples were to marry. Further, there are clearly reasons, and in some cases very good reasons, why cohabiters and single parents have chosen not to marry.

In fact, it's fair to ask: are all the differences in the well-being of children between married parent and other families simply due to the differences in the characteristics of the people who choose to marry compared to those who choose not to marry? Technically speaking, are the apparent benefits of marriage just selection effects?

The answer is a qualified no. While much of the difference in child well-being between married and other families can be accounted for by selection (that is, differences in the observable and unobservable characteristics of married and unmarried parents), there clearly are some intrinsic benefits to marriage. Now, these benefits may stem from the extra security and motivations couples feel when they are married. It could come from increased willingness of extended family to provide support to married couples. It could even come from reasons that I'm not clever enough to think of.

How much will marriage promotion benefit children? It's difficult to say. It depends on the circumstances of the children. Encouraging unmarried biological parents to marry, forming a married biological family, will have some benefits, although the well-being of children in these promoted marriages on average will not begin to approach the well-being of children in existing married parent families, mainly because the characteristics of the parents are so different.

Encouraging single mothers to marry men who are not the fathers of their children may have less positive benefits because these would form stepparent families and research clearly shows that stepparent families, again on average, are not as beneficial for children as living with their two married, biological parents. And if promoted marriages are less stable, then the benefits of a short term marriage have to be weighed against the potential harmful effects of the disruption in family life if these marriages dissolve.

The Bush administration has proposed to spend $1.5 billion on marriage promotion. Can this money be well spent? Well, the case for marriage is strong, but there are many open questions. Can we promote marriage? How great are the potential benefits? And finally, if the goal is to help children, would the money be better spent on other programs aimed at improving child well-being or simply not being spent at all? You know, there is something to be said for deficit reduction or tax cuts, but that's the context in which $1.5 billion actually seems kind of small.

Beyond arguments on the ultimate cost effectiveness of marriage promotion, there remains evidence that there are intrinsic benefits to marriage. I'd like to turn the stage over to Gary Gates, who will discuss another sort of marriage promotion.

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: Thank you, Greg. My role here is to talk about the issue that I think has become sort of the marquis issue around marriage right now because it's been elevated to the level of a constitutional amendment, and that's the issue of same-sex marriage, and there is now much discussion about whether or not marriage should be defined in a particular way in the constitution.

While heterosexual marriage, and in fact heterosexual cohabitation, have both received a fair bit of scholarly research attention, the same cannot be said for understanding the dynamics and the characteristics of gay and lesbian couples. Most marriage and cohabitation research does not explore or compare outcomes for same-sex couples, so Greg's point about a prima fascia case about the benefits of heterosexual marriage actually has not been made for same-sex couples. We do not know whether, for instance, child well-being differs for heterosexual, biological parents versus same-sex parents. It has simply never been studied.

Possibly as a result of the lack of the research in this area, the same-sex marriage debate has somewhat different parameters than the marriage promotion debate. Both opponents and proponents of same-sex marriage frame the debate less in social science research findings and more within a moral and ethical context. Many arguments underlying opponents of same-sex marriage defend a traditional interpretation in marriage that has roots in traditional moral and religious convictions, often those related to the well-being of raising children, while proponents of same-sex marriage increasingly frame the debate within the construct of civil rights protections.

For any of you who know me, it would be hard for you to believe that I would engage in an act of shameless self-promotion—(laughter)—but the principal objective of the book that has just come out on Monday, The Gay and Lesbian Atlas, and I do want to acknowledge my coauthor, Jason Ost, who is over in the corner there, and the focus really of my comments today is to interject an empirical framework into this debate by describing some of the kind of basic characteristics of same-sex couples in the United States.

One of the key questions about same-sex marriage is to what degree it will alter and potentially change the composition of married couples in the United States. According to census figures, even if all same-sex couples who identified themselves either as already married or as unmarried partners were to legally marry tomorrow, they would comprise less than one in 100 married couples in the United States. Another, and probably more compelling, issue in this debate is the degree to which introducing same-sex couples into the marriage mix, as it were, might alter the characteristics of married couples and potentially alter the institution of marriage.

Two key characteristics that have been discussed quite frequently in debates are stability—so how stable are the relationships—and the issue of raising children. In terms of stability, since same-sex couples cannot legally marry, nor can any marriages they might have had been recognized in the United States, at least potentially till May 17th, which is when marriages would begin in Massachusetts, same-sex relationships are often described with many of the negative traits that we assign to cohabiting couples, so it is true that research finds that heterosexual couples who cohabit are in less stable and more fluid relationships, and because same-sex couples are—by definition have to cohabit, those traits are often in the public perception simply assigned to them, but census data actually shows a very different picture.

The same-sex unmarried partners are actually twice as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to be living in the same house together for at least five years, so it suggests a certain stability of their relationships that's much greater than heterosexual unmarried partners. Homeownership is another typical way that we look at stable relationships, and in fact homeownership—almost two-thirds of same-sex couples in the census own their home, compared to less than half of heterosexual cohabiting couples, so assigning the traits of heterosexual cohabiting couples to same-sex couples is simply inaccurate.

The second issue is children and to what degree are same-sex couples raising children, and I think this is one of the biggest surprises that came out of the analysis of the census data. One in four couples of the same-sex couples in the census are raising children under age 18, and they live in 96 percent of U.S. counties. So while, again, as an overall fraction of the number of families raising children, same-sex couples are a tiny fraction, it is hardly an unusual circumstance among certainly gay and lesbian couples and it's not exactly completely unusual in many areas across the country.

I'll close with one of the more interesting findings from the atlas, which is this extent to which gay and lesbian couples often reflect the demographic characteristics of the heterosexual couples around them. And the example I'll give is raising children. The states where same-sex couples are most likely raising children are in order the top 10—I won't name all 50—Mississippi, South Dakota, Alaska, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Kansas, and Utah—oh, and one more. And Arizona is number 10.

All of these states have somewhat more conservative views around marriage and family, and in fact 5 of those 10 are the states where households of all types are most likely raising children, and actually three of the top five are in the top five for that statistic. When we look at large metropolitan areas, the places where same-sex couples are most likely to raise children are San Antonio, Texas; Bergen Passaic, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; Houston, Texas; Fort Worth, Texas; Newark, New Jersey; Riverside, California; Nassau-Suffolk, New York; Norfolk/Virginia Beach, Virginia; and Orange County, California. (Laughter.) Again, places that are among some of the more conservative locations in the United States.

So while the atlas is, I think, good at demonstrating differences in the geographic and demographic characteristics between same-sex and different-sex couples, perhaps its most compelling contribution to the marriage debate is the extent to which these couples are similar and share many of the characteristics of their married counterparts.

Thank you.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Thank you, Gary. That's quite interesting.

For some reflection and to give us some idea what this might mean in the coming election, we have two political strategists with us. I'm going to start with Kellyanne first.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: Thank you. Thank you very much, and thank you for having me here at the Urban Institute. I appreciate it very much. I'm going to try to give a little bit of empirical evidence to some of the discussions that we've heard already. My background, as is Anna Greenberg's, is as a survey researcher, so I'm going to share with you some of the results of recent national polls. To the extent that I can reveal some of the data from some statewide work we've done I will do that. You also have a handout—it says "Nationwide Survey on Marriage, Civil Unions, and the Federal Marriage Amendment." This is just a brief compilation of what was a very comprehensive survey.

It seems to me as a survey researcher its important to examine an issue from soup to nuts—to go from general to specific in the survey research instrument rather than, as is wont to be the case with some organizations that do research on a number of issues all at once and just add a question on a certain issue clustered between "do you think D.C. should have its own major league baseball team?" and "When do you think the conflict in the Middle East will end?"—as if anybody can actually answer that question, but it's asked. And then just sort of, boom: "do you think that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry?" So we tried to do a very comprehensive look at marriage in mid-March. The survey dates for the methodology are on your handouts.

I will review a few highlights, and I'll end with the political currency implications as we see them currently with the issue of same-sex marriage. But I'd like to begin from general to specific. This debate, at least from the perspective of the so-called right and center-right in American politics, really exists about marriage, whether it's the president's initiative for healthy marriages, whether it's his call to examine the need for a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage as being between one man and one woman, or whether it is even the vote that the Kansas State legislature is going to have today, in fact, about whether or not to refer to the ballot for this fall an amendment to the Constitution that would state exactly that: marriage exists between one man and one woman. Or whether it is the hearings that Senator Santorum is intending to have in the Senate tomorrow through the Finance Committee, which is all about, "healthy marriages."

What's going on here is a discussion about the institution of marriage. How it is defined, what it means, who is included, whether it's worthy of protection, if so, at what level? With whose intervention? Is it a personal matter? Should it be decided by the states, by the federal government? Who should have a say and who should have a stake and who should not?

So in our survey we actually began the survey talking about marriage, because once you ask very specific questions in a survey, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, and that's a very irresponsible way of polling, frankly, so we started out—one of the first questions we asked people was: please define in your own words what is marriage. And anyone in the survey was welcome to say whatever they wanted. Curiously, we heard generic responses like, quote, "working together towards same goal. Commitment. Good. Beautiful. Special. Honesty. Truthfulness. Trust." The cluster of answers that was most dominant to that open-ended question, though, did talk about opposite-sex specific marriage. Fifteen percent said it's between a man and a woman; 8 percent a religious union; 5 percent partnership between two different sexes based on love; permanent union to raise a family. And then we had about 30 percent saying some type of non-opposite sex specific: Bond between two adults. Partnership based on love. Commitment. Legal contract. Monogamous union. So that they did not necessarily specify with the gender of the respective parties to what they believe the definition of marriage is.

But then we asked the question that's been asked many places, which is, please agree or disagree with intensity, strongly or somewhat, with some of the following statements. The first one being: marriage exists only between one man and one woman. I've seen higher results. I've seen lower results, but it just so happened that at this point in time 69 percent strongly agreed with that statement; 77 percent total agreement. Now, when you get numbers that high, you recognize that that represents a plurality, if not a majority, of all two or three—depending how you look at it—major political parties, ideological backgrounds, certainly race and ethnicity. Both genders are included in that majority agreement. We asked a few other questions, though. We asked if, quote, "traditional marriage between a man and a woman should be protected because it is a cornerstone of our society," inviting agreement or disagreement. And again you had very strong numbers agreeing with these statements.

What we find from all of this is that whereas the country pretends it is progressive, it is actually very statist. Ask any incumbent who smiles with glee after they are reelected for the 17th time, even though the voters were "starving for change" and wanted to elect the generic, perennially attractive new person over the stale incumbent. Many people think that that's only because of money and access that incumbents get reelected, but in large part it's because of us—the voting populace that has this—through one lobe of the brain this love affair with change and choice and options and new things and revolution, and the other lobe of the brain almost stops us dead in our tracks from exercising any of those choices, selecting an option, or actually inciting or fulfilling some type of new revolution.

The same is being played out here and in some of the other questions in this survey, as you'll see, we discovered that people are basically saying not in my backyard or not in my city hall with respect to same-sex marriage. I was very surprised to see in our poll and other national polls on the same topic the degree to which people are paying attention to this issue. Sixty-seven percent in this survey reveal that they are following either closely, somewhat closely, or very closely the matter of marriage and same-sex marriage, civil unions, and the federal marriage amendment—the whole clusters of issues underneath this large umbrella. But I'm also very surprised at how many people say they don't want, they would not vote for, and they don't want same-sex marriage in their own states.

We get this anecdotally too; we've dial-tested some of the messages for a couple of groups across the country. And what we find is that if the entire notion and philosophy of people who advocated behind-closed-doors relationships was exactly that for 30 or 40 years. This is the idea that "this is my business; it's behind closed doors; it's consenting adults; it's private." Well, the moment that was sort of taken out and shoved into the public consciousness on all of the networks and the cable stations, people across the country panicked—many of them—and they said, well, wait a second. This is no longer behind your closed doors. This is no longer a private matter. This is in my living room now. And many people feel that it is that much more imminent that they would need to deal either as a member of this nation or a member of a particular state—a citizen or voter of a particular state—with the issue of same-sex marriage and civil unions.

It is my own opinion, listening to people all across this country that the catapulting of this into the national consciousness and giving it so much visibility so quickly may have set back the same-sex marriage movement significantly. There was so much backlash, even among some of her ardent fans, against Rosie O'Donnell for her leap-frogging to the front of the line and it just so happened the timing was very poor for some of the other people who were in that line trying to achieve marriage as a same-sex couple on this—on the steps of city hall in San Francisco because she and her girlfriend got ahead of the crowd and then the attorney general stopped marriages—gave a temporary injunction—in California. And because of that you hear people who say, "I liked her on her show. I thought it was good that she would give visibility to this issue, but it actually set us back a little bit."

Just to go through some more of the data here, I will address the political currency implications. I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that in our data we somehow see that same-sex marriage or the protection of traditional marriage or any of the issues within this larger umbrella are somehow going to overtake the war in Iraq or the economy or even healthcare and educational concerns as the number one or even the number five issue going into the presidential and congressional elections this fall. That simply is not meted out in the data.

However, because you have at least 12 states that are guaranteed to deal with this issue this fall on their ballots by either way of an amendment to their state constitutions or through an initiative or referendum with others pending—and that could double by the time you get to November with all of the signatures being collected now. Because you will have this on the ballot in different states where you also will concurrently have a presidential election and some statewide races—governor, senator, of course, Congress—it can be that this issue will make a difference in certain congressional districts or in certain states where voters seem more energized on one side of the issue or the other than is maybe easier to see when you're talking about how people regard it nationwide.

In terms of political currency, however, 53 percent of the people surveyed gave this an 8, 9, or 10 on a scale of 1 to 10—10 being the highest—in terms of how important it's going to be when they vote this fall. The most popular response was 8 in the one 1-to-10 scale. And I will say that part of what gives this a little bit of added political currency is its novelty, but also it's so easy to understand. The easier to understand an issue—doesn't mean it's uncomplicated, doesn't mean it's simple, but it's easier to understand than going through the nuts and bolts of financing healthcare and prescription drug coverage or figuring out the situation in Iraq or creating more jobs. It is easier to understand.

What we have as well is that you've got this—outside of the political landscape you have so much grassroots activity going on now. I mentioned before the number of people lining up to be married in California and other places like New Paltz, New York, but you also have just this past weekend 25,000 people filling Safeco Field on the West Coast—not exactly Mississippi—in defense of marriage and two weeks prior to that—you may not have read about it because I don't think it was written much about, but you should know the fact that two weeks prior to that there were 7,000 people who came out for rallies in defense of traditional marriage in no other place than San Francisco.

I thought the most remarkable thing there, and you see it in the data as well, is how many Asian-Americans mobilized. They're usually a very private population, but they have some of the most intact marriages in our nation's population, and as we say at my firm, "Asians are the new Hispanics"; meaning about 10 or 15 years from now they're going to be at a level where Hispanics have been growing over the last 10 to 15 years. And if we start paying attention to them now, the way we should have been paying attention to Hispanics the last 10 or 15 years, we'll understand that they are—Asian-Americans are incredibly powerful—prospectively powerful ethnic demographic in this country.

Let me just close by saying when we tested different 12 messages the most compelling message where people said that they would be more likely to support the Federal Marriage Amendment and protections for traditional marriage came not with the economic arguments. The second most popular message was that the FMA would lead to the protection of children. And among the 12 messages tested, —the number one was that this has a bipartisan precedent, and the way we just turned it was by reading the fact that in 1996 the United States Senate passed legislation—Defense of Marriage Act. We explained what that was and we said it was signed into law by President Clinton. The irony is the fact that this has bipartisan precedent at some level was the most compelling message to many people in saying, well, this is precisely why we should carry on with the same type of protections and the same type of definitions of marriage, at least at the federal level.

There also is this impulse towards federal intervention even among people who usually eschew federal intervention. You see a lot of otherwise self-identified conservatives, moderates, and even some libertarians in this survey saying that they believe that marriage merits a definition and merits a one-size-fits-all policy rather have if left to the states. I guess in some type of maybe intuitive recognition of full faith and credit clause, but in any event, there is an impulse for federal action where among some people there normally would not be.

And finally I would say that the one piece of political currency we see is that this whole idea of civil unions as a third way, which we finally referred to as the "Kerry Conundrum," is soundly rejected by voters once they are explained in objective terms what it has meant—how it's been passed in New Jersey recently or what it means in Vermont. There is not the great enthusiasm for that as a compromise, as I think some would have you believe.

And I think what's going to really either confuse or engage voters going into the fall is that you have two presidential candidates who don't seem to agree on very much except they're both running on Bush's record at the moment, Yet, the one thing they were very firm and very quick to respond to was the Massachusetts Supreme court decision recently, and both President Bush and Senator Kerry came out against—were very critical of that decision and they both stated that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

That's really where their agreement breaks down, but it's probably no coincidence that 73 percent of self-identified Republicans in this survey said the Republican position on same-sex marriage reflects their own, but only 41 percent of Democrats said the same. So I think there's perhaps political currency to be gained with same-sex marriage. In traditional marriage it's more difficult to see that than the political currency that could be squandered if it is an issue that is mishandled or someone who is speaking about it as a leader or as a potential leader seems inarticulate about it and/or seems uncomfortable in their own skin as they explain their opinions on it.

Thank you.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Kellyanne, thank you. Okay, let's turn to Anna.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm actually going to sort of pull back a little bit and talk about marriage more broadly because in a lot of ways I think the same-sex marriage debate or the gay marriage debate—it's not that it's beside the point, but it is a symptom of larger sociodemographic changes in our society that have huge implications for policy, but also for politics.

You know, one of the—I actually came to this—I wrote an article in 2000 for Blueprint, the DLC's magazine, called "The Marriage Gap" and I was looking—and I sort of noticed that there was this huge political difference between people who were married and unmarried and I was actually mainly focused on people who were married at the time and now I seem to have shifted to caring about people who are unmarried, maybe because I'm unmarried, so, you know, I care more about my own people but—(laughter)—and I've actually spent a fair amount of time doing research on this in the last six months, including a national survey and state surveys and focus groups with unmarried women in particular.

But the thing that is clear to me is that this country is changing and it's changing in a particular direction. If you look at the 1950s, 80 percent of all people lived in married households. Now, just about half of people live in unmarried households. Half of all people are—46 percent of all women are unmarried. Almost half of everybody is unmarried. That is a dramatic shift and it's a shift where we really have not as a society sort of caught up to, whether it's policies in the workplaces around how you get healthcare benefits, whether it's—how we—you know, retirement and the kinds of jobs that women are in and the way that retirement affects women who never get married or women who are widowed young, childcare, you name it. There are whole sets of issues around the fact that we're moving from a married society to an unmarried society in ways that policies have not caught up to it.

And certainly our politics have not caught up to it. I mean, one of the things that's most interesting to me about the Bush tax cuts are—you know, honestly I think it mostly went to the wealthy, but the other thing about it that's interesting is that it mainly went to middle-income married people with kids. If you are a single person and you're sort of lower income—middle-lower income, and you don't have kids, you are very unlikely to have benefited from Bush's tax cuts. Almost all of the president's economic policies are really centered around people who are married. So if you think about all the places where we exist, whether it's in the workplace, whether it's home, whether it's in politics, policy, this is a country that's moving towards being unmarried, but we haven't really sort of caught up with it yet.

And I think that the debate that we're seeing about gay marriage, while obviously tapping into lots of different sort of values debates, whether they're religious debates—primarily religious debates, but other debates in some sense is a symptom of the larger set of changes that our country is undergoing.

And it has really big political implications. If you look at the way people say they're going to vote this election year and you look at the differences between married and unmarried people, they are enormous and they reflect real political disagreements about how our country is run. If you—for example, let me just give you some—I have my own data here. I'll use some data. This is looking at some combined datasets I put together from some of our national surveys over the last four months. If you look at unmarried women, 62 percent of unmarried women say they're going to vote for Kerry; 35 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. Married women, 44 percent say they're going to vote for Kerry; 53 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. That's bigger than gender gap. That's a much bigger gap than a lot of the gaps that we talk about.

But that gap actually exists for men too: so unmarried men, 53 percent say they're going to vote for Kerry; 43 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. So plus 10 for Kerry with unmarried men. Forty-nine percent of married men say they're going to vote for Kerry; 57 percent say they're going to vote for Bush. So there's obviously sort of an intersection between gender and marriage because unmarried women are the most Democratic and married men are the least Democratic or most Republican.

These are really, really big differences and they reflect real differences in the way that these groups believe that they are dealt with by government. Mostly I've spent most of my time looking at unmarried women, but let's take unmarried women as an example. One of the things that I have been thinking about ever since I wrote that article about the marriage gap is why are unmarried people so different than married people. Does something happen when you get married? When you get married do you become a Republican? (Laughter.) You know, this is why I'm probably not married. I won't become a Republican. You know, sorry Kellyanne. You know, what happens?

And we know there are some things when you get married that make you more conservative: you have kids, you become more religious, you pay more taxes, you become a homeowner. There are all sorts of things that happen in the course of your lifecycle that sort of push you to be more conservative, though not those kinds of changes. I mean, people generally don't change dramatically over their lifetime. If you're born a Democrat and raised a Democrat, you're likely to stay Democrat for the rest of your life. Similarly, if you're born and raised a Republican, you're likely to stay a Republican. So people don't just change, but there are sort of small shifts.

And so I've been interested in this question and so I pulled together the national election study from the 1950s till now and looked at each decade and looked at the cohort of unmarried women in each decade. And unmarried women as a group have changed in ways that are not that surprising given, you know, the impact of the women's movement. Women in the 1950s who were unmarried—(audio break, tape change)—homemakers. Women who are unmarried now are more educated, more racially diverse, younger. They are delaying marriage. So in other words, if you look at the whole unmarried block, there's a percentage that are never married, that are divorced, that are widowed. There's a larger block of never-married women in the unmarried women cohort now, so there are women who are delaying marriage as opposed to if you looked in the 1950s and '60s, there were more, you know, widowed women in that category.

It is a group that is simply more progressive because—I believe because of the huge societal changes around, you know, women getting an education, birth control pill, et cetera, et cetera. All the things that we know kind of changed our society. This group is different and I actually believe that as more of these never-married unmarried women get married, that married women are going to become more Democratic and more progressive because we know that people, again, just don't dramatically change when they get married. They change sort of slightly to reflect some of the views of their partners.

I think this is big. Twenty percent of the electorate are unmarried women. I mean, this is—one in five voters in 2004 is going to be an unmarried woman. This is a huge block in the electorate and it is a group that is left behind despite all the changes that I talked about: better educated, higher income, et cetera. They are still the most economically marginal group. They're more like—you know, if you look at women of color or single mothers, there's a whole set of—these are economically marginal folks for the most part. They are left behind by Bush's tax cut policies. They are very unlikely to have benefited from them unless they have children. Only 27 percent of unmarried women have kids. They are, you know, one paycheck away from disaster, whether it's not having healthcare benefits. They certainly have a hard time affording getting higher education. They don't have anybody to help them pay for community college. This is a group that, you know, that dropped off the most after the failure of the Clinton healthcare plan—sort of reform in 1993-94. If you look at the dropoff in participating in politics, there was a huge dropoff of unmarried women. I believe in part the sense that the thing that concerned them most, which is healthcare, has gone unaddressed for the last 12 years.

So I think this marriage debate, whether it's about gay marriage or about marriage promotion actually in some ways obscures a kind of massive change in our society that policy hasn't caught up with, politics hasn't caught up with, but is actually pretty in some ways divisive within our society. There certainly are some pretty dramatic battle lines drawn in this election, and I think it's something we should talk about.

I want to say just a couple of things about gay marriage just to follow up on what Kellyanne was talking about and then I'll stop. I think that we have to be really careful looking at public opinion data about gay marriage. There's no question that most of the data shows that a majority of people oppose gay marriage whether it—depending on how you word the question you can get 70 percent or 55 percent. I mean, there's a huge—this is an area of polling that is fraught with all the kind of question-wording bias that we know about, so there's a huge range, but I actually think that we should—this is actually in some ways, I think, the last battle of the marriage debate as opposed to the one looking into the future.

When you look at public opinion around gay marriage, for instance on the amendment, there is much higher support for a flag-burning amendment or a school prayer amendment. In fact, I'm actually surprised at how low support is for a constitutional amendment and when you ask the question, you know, do we need an amendment or are state laws sufficient, most people think state laws are sufficient. Even white evangelical Christians think state laws are sufficient. I did an evangelical poll a few weeks ago and I was sort of shocked at the—less than half of these evangelicals think you actually need a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

And when you look at the age differences on gay marriage, they are huge. Gen Y, people under 25 are evenly split or slightly in favor of gay marriage. About two-thirds support civil unions. You know, 20-, 30-, 40-point differences depending on how you word the question between people who are under 25 and people who are over 65. And Gen Y is a generation that is, you know, open and tolerant on a whole set of issues, whether it's interracial marriage or how you feel about immigrants or gay marriage. I mean, there's a whole range of issues where Gen Y is sort of fundamentally different than people who are older than them.

And so I think—not in any way to diminish, you know, this debate. It is an important debate, especially for people who care about, you know, gay rights as I do, but I think it's a debate that I think is ultimately that people opposed to it are going to be on the wrong side of history if you just look at the way this country is changing. And certainly I agree with Kellyanne that it's not going to be a decisive issue in this election.

Just to close with one statement pair that we tested in a poll recently. We said, "This year jobs and healthcare are important to me; more important to me than guns and gay marriage when deciding on a candidate" versus "If a candidate is a threat to my right to a gun and is open to legalizing gay marriage, I'm against him no matter what." Sixty-four percent said jobs and healthcare. Thirty-five percent said guns and gay marriage. I think it's not going to be an issue in this election.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Well, we've managed to politicize this. (Laughter.) Always fun. So I think it's time to take questions form the audience, so what I would ask you to do is we have several mikes in the room and please wait to be recognized by me and when I do recognize you, please stand up and then introduce yourself and the organization that you represent. So, yes.

NEVA GRANT, National Public Radio: I have a question for Dr. Acs. You had mentioned that when you select out for the type of personalities who are likely to get married you found that there are still intrinsic qualities to marriage that are beneficial. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that point and perhaps give an example or two of what you meant.

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: Sure. There are obvious differences—observable differences between people who marry and people who don't, and there are reasons to believe that there are intrinsic benefits to marriage such as, you know, the security that comes from marriage. You're more secure, you're happier and healthier at home and so you do better in the labor market. You do a better job of being a parent. If there are two parents in the household who are secure, they do a better job interacting with a child, so there are reasons to believe that there are intrinsic benefits to marriage.

In the paper that's in your packet we did a thought experiment—my coauthor Sandi Nelson and I—and what we did—we said, let us pretend that—let's look at the factors that affect child well-being on a host of outcomes from food security to poverty to having a parent who is not depressed, for example. And so let's look at the factors that affect these outcomes for married parents, then let's pretend we automatically married off cohabiting couples. They're engaged or in the same household—poof, you're married. How much improvement would we expect to see in the outcomes for the kids with cohabiting parents if they were to marry? If it was all due to characteristics, we shouldn't see any improvement in this little experiment, and we see that that's not the case.

So, for example, if we look at poverty and we were about - the poverty rate for children living with their unmarried parents, so both mom and dad are in the household but just not married, that poverty rate is 26.4 percent. If they were to marry and then enjoy the same benefits that married couples have, their poverty rate would drop to 19.8 percent. That's a nontrivial drop in predicted poverty. It's still well above the poverty rate for children living with their married parents, which is 7.6 percent, and everything else sort of follows along those lines. So what that says to me at least is that there are some intrinsic benefits to marriage. Kids who are being raised by unmarried parents would benefit if their parents got married, but most of the gap—two-thirds of the gap—is due to clear, observable differences between the couples that won't simply go away.

So there's sort of—I think there's a middle ground here. It's not that marriage is a cure-all and solves all our problems, but there are definite benefits to marriage.

NEVA GRANT, National Public Radio: And just to follow up very quickly, did you do any work on dysfunctional marriages? I mean, were you purposefully trying to isolate the most healthy marriages?

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: That is a best-case scenario, so I—these data I can't do much with dysfunctional marriages, and come back in a year and a half and I'll have some more information on dysfunctional marriages, but that's a best-case scenario. That is observable differences, not the unobservable differences that might keep those people apart.

JOHN CROUCH, Americans for Divorce Reform: Dr. Acs, you were talking about the possible demographic effects of promoting marriage for people who otherwise weren't getting married and I wonder if you could say this marriage promotion initiative of the president's—how much of it is doing that—getting people who weren't going to marry to get married and how much of it is providing skills training to people who are already married or planning to get married.

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: Well, as I glance over—because Wade Horn, the assistant secretary for the administration representing children and families, is here and he might be far better to answer the question than I. In fairness I think the administration is conducting this battle on multiple fronts—that they are interested in these communitywide approaches to improve education about marriage, that marriage is generally a beneficial thing, and to encourage people who are vacillating behind getting married or not getting married that there are real benefits to marriage and with that information maybe they'll make the decision to marry.

The programs that are aimed at providing relationship—you know, premarital counseling and relationship skills—some of those are addressing the needs of currently married couples to help them have happier, healthier marriages. And I don't know whether Mr. Horn wants to be more specific.

WADE HORN, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: I think in some ways the phrase "promoting marriage" has led to some misunderstanding about what it is the president's trying to accomplish with his Healthy Marriage Initiative, but we have a situation where 90 percent of Americans have been married, are married, or will be married sometime in their lifetime. If I had a product where 90 percent of Americans had it, will have, it, or had it at some point in their lifetime, I'd be very rich. And it seems to me that we don't have to promote the ideal of marriage to the American people since most people value it, see it as important, see it as delightful for themselves and for their children. Even divorced parents, single parents, you know, they often have for their own children, as a life goal for their own children, the ideal of a stable, lifelong, healthy marriage.

So while it is true that some of the money would be used to talk about and research the benefits of marriage, and it is also true that part of it would be public awareness campaigns to talk about the importance of skills in helping people form and sustain healthy marriages, the vast majority of the funds would be utilized for skill-building approaches such as premarital education or marriage enrichment and so forth. So I think that a difficulty has been the use of this term "promoting marriage," which suggests that we're going to spend our time, you know, wagging our fingers in people's faces who aren't married and telling them they should get married.

We're not going to spend our time doing that. Instead, what we really value a great deal in this initiative is government staying out of the individual decisionmaking of a couple as to whether or not they ought to marry, but once they make the decision, are interested in exploring marriage as an option for themselves, providing them on a voluntary basis access to marriage education services, which, again, is not captured as well from the talk—you simply used the phrase "promoting marriage."

CYNTHIA WOODSIDE, National Association of Social Workers: And I guess this is for you, Mr. Gates. I think you mentioned that one out of four same-sex couples is raising children. Do you also have data on whether or not they are biological children or adopted children, and if so, how those percentages might compare to those of opposite sex couples raising children.

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: Yeah, it's a little difficult to get at that with census because—for any of you who filled out your census form, it's one person fills out the form and says how everyone in the household is—so if I filled out the form it's how everybody is related to me. So with same-sex couples, how those children are related to the person that fills out the form can get a little bit difficult. It's not clear what the typical person would call, for instance, the children of his or her partner. Would they call them natural born; would they call them a stepchild?

So it's a little hard to get at, but what I can tell you is in general, the vast majority of children in both married households, unmarried partner, different sex, and unmarried partner, same sex are called natural-born child. However, in same-sex couples, they're twice as likely to have an adopted—call a child an adopted child from married couples. But that number is still a small proportion. I think it's like 2 percent. I can't remember the exact figure, but I believe it's about 2 percent of married couples have an adopted child, and then it's like 4 percent in same-sex couples. So they're twice as likely. But, again, the vast majority of them are actually called natural born child.

MANUAL LOPEZ, University of Chicago: I had a question that might bring together Ms. Greenberg and Conway: the question of polling. I mean, I agree that it seems like on gay marriage there's a remarkable difference if you look at young people versus older people, and on college campuses even the Republican groups somehow have a large portion who are, I would say, sympathetically disposed towards gay marriage. But if you take this question of Generation Y, then shouldn't you take it further and think about Generation Z and Z prime and so forth? That is, what happens if you do have gay marriage? What's the effect on people who've grown up solely in this new world where you have this new definition, a new understanding of marriage, and what might be the impact there?

Now, I think Ms. Conway mentioned, for instance, this difference in opinion polling between people who say marriage is a commitment between two people versus people who give another definition that's more connected toward—that relies more on the opposite sex meaning.

Now, it seems to me—and maybe you could discuss this, but just as people who grew up after, let's say, the divorce laws were loosened in the United States had a somewhat different imagination of marriage and understanding of it, that after something like gay marriage you'll have children growing up with a different understanding that would be more an act of commitment, less connected to some bigger natural world because you're separating marriage from procreation, and therefore that that would have an effect on the willingness of people to sacrifice a marriage.

I don't know if I've been clear on that. It's a bit long but—what I'm trying to get at is are we taking into account the effect on the imagination of future children that would be caused by gay marriage?

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: We need to be quick in our response because we are running out of time.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: A couple things. It is absolutely true that one's affection for and allegiance to the notion of traditional marriage increases with one's age. Part of that is not because young people have bought into this notion—I think, to use or paraphrase your words, sir—that marriage can be anything between anyone. It's that they less raised eyebrows or more shrugged shoulders about it.

But you should take a look at Generation X, the 57 million Americans born roughly between '65 and '78 who grew up under no-fault divorce laws and mom in the workplace, and very me, me, me, me, women-centric culture because now that they are deferring or denying marriage altogether, many of them will tell you in survey research the reason that they're waiting is because they want to get it right, that they don't want to have the same kind of marriage situation in which they were raised. They want it to be healthy, they want it to be warm, they want it to be forever, because now we have a very kid-centric society. We have "babies on board" and Babies R Us and the like. We didn't have that when this generation was being raised in single-parent households. We had the devil literally being a child: Damien in "The Omen," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Exorcist." (Laughter.) It was like children were devils, literally, and now they are glorified and deified in our culture.

And just quickly, when you think about Generation Z, your theory may play out. I don't think anyone is in a position to know that right now. But what also may happen is what has happened in many X and Y'ers on the matter of abortion. People believe that they were born after Roe versus Wade so therefore they would just buy into it, and you see them considerably pro-life compared to when they are in their reproductive years or, that they're unmarried, or you would think that they're much more libertarian, free-wheeling, but many of them, where religion and morality left off, science and medicine—have converted these technologically savvy people who look at images all day long have said, well, wait a second; I looked at a sonogram at week 12 and I don't think that's a polliwog. So it really depends. I don't think any of us can estimate what's going to happen to this generation as goes marriage.

The very quick thing I wanted to add is when you're talking about demographic groups it is remarkable and irrefutable—and I spent a whole page on it in my handout—black Americans, are the ethnic group most firmly sanctifying and believing in the traditional notions of marriage, and that they do not buy into the civil rights analogy at all: 6 percent of them "strongly agree" that the current movement for same-sex marriage is analogous to the civil rights movement. And with all due respect to those who may believe that, the idea that being excluded from a lunch counter or drinking from the same water fountain or sitting in a certain place on a bus is analogous to the current movement is not winning much favor within the African-American community.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: I'll just respond quickly. I have no idea what Generation Z is going to think about marriage, but I would just go back to the presentation about the benefits of marriage. I didn't hear that it had to be with the opposite sex to have marriage with kids—have all the benefits of that kind of marriage. I don't think we have any evidence that kids wouldn't have the same benefit of being in a marriage if they were the same sex or of opposite sex.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Did you want to say something on that point?

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: I mean, it was sort of rhetorical, but anyway. (Laughter.)

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: I'm happy with rhetoric on that one.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: I think we have time for one more question—or no? Oh, we have 15 more minutes. Oh, okay, I'm sorry.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: The man with the yellow tie—or whichever, blue dress or yellow tie first; I don't really care.

JAN ERICKSON, National Organization for Women: I just want to reinforce the need to do more research on dysfunctional families as regards marriage promotion, because with the knowledge that a wide variety of surveys at local and state levels have indicated, the rather pervasive incidents of domestic violence, it seems to me that maybe we're potentially talking about a minority of marriages here as benefiting children if there is this incidence of domestic violence ranging anywhere from 33 percent to 55 percent and over. I think this really needs to be quantified.

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: I'm not sure that I understood you correctly. I don't believe that there's a minority of marriages that are good for children or a majority of marriages where there's domestic violence. I was unsure what you said there.

JAN ERICKSON, National Organization for Women: Some of the statistics thus far indicate that there is a majority of relationships among welfare recipients that have had domestic violence at some point, but we really do need better data.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: It is interesting—I was doing a quick web search the other day—that many of the groups that are concerned about domestic violence, particularly among welfare recipient families, are firmly against marriage promotion, that they think in fact it's promoting marriage to a population that doesn't have great tools for a healthy marriage.

GREGORY ACS, Urban Institute: An unhealthy marriage, a marriage where there is lots of strife, physical, verbal abuse, is bad. That bastion of liberalism, the Wall Street Journal, today even had an article talking—"Is Your Marriage Making You Sick?"—talking about stressful relationships. That having been said, I think that a concern about domestic violence is real. I don't think the proponents of marriage want to promote anything close to an unhealthy marriage. They do want to provide relationship and conflict resolution skills to those who are already in couples and married to help avoid domestic violence, to make stronger relationships last longer, and I think that's a very positive thing. I think they also want to make it known that when you look at the raw numbers it's very hard to not see the benefits of marriage. It's not for everyone, it's not for all circumstances, but I think that the idea that marriage is a good thing for most people in most circumstances, that's what the numbers look like to me.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Yes?

DAN GILGOFF, U.S. News and World Report: First off I had a question for Mr. Gates and Dr. Acs. Mr. Gates said in the course of his presentation that there was an absence of social science research comparing the children of same-sex marriages to the children of heterosexual marriages—or same-sex couples, excuse me. And there's a number of researchers who I think would refute that from—I'm thinking of Charlotte Patterson at University of Virginia or Judith Stacey at NYU or Ellen Perrin at Tufts, and I'm wondering if you could sort of weigh in—they would say that the research in this field is hardly adequate but at the same time it's incredibly consistent in showing that there are not—the children of these same-sex relationships don't suffer disadvantages. That's the first question.

And I had a second question for Ms. Greenberg and Conway, and that is we hear so much about polling research regarding approval or disapproval of the Federal Marriage Amendment or same-sex marriage generally. I'm wondering if there is polling research, however, on opinions regarding same-sex parenting and to what degree that's correlated with respondents' support or lack of support or opposition to same-sex marriage.

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: I'll start. I agree there is a body of research, and in fact, the people you named are some of the leaders in that field. The one sort of data point I'll give you on that, though, is the total—if you combine all the studies of children being raised by same-sex parents, the total number of children studied over the last 20 years is 600 kids. I agree that there is a body of research, but I would challenge that when you frame that against the body of research around how children fare in heterosexual marriage versus single parent versus step families versus all of that, that that literature pales in that comparison, which was really my point.

I also would agree that the research that's out there, as you point out that even experts like Judith Stacey and some of the others you mentioned indicate that there is inadequate—the one common theme that always comes up when it is studied is that children being raised by same-sex parents across the standard range of measures of child well-being that are sort of the normal things we measure in the field do not differ at all. That is not to say that those kids aren't different but—so there are characteristics where the children sometimes show differences, but they generally—on the well-being measures they don't appear to be any different.

And I'll turn it over to—

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: The question on the polling data about opinions about parenting—

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: I'm sure it exists. I don't have any specific data about how people feel about gay adoption or gay families raising kids so I can't really answer that question.

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: I'll add one point. There was a recent question asked in the LA Times about how come—this isn't parenting, but how comfortable it would be if your kids—this is a national survey—how comfortable are you with your children having an elementary school teacher who is gay, and it was a plurality said they were comfortable with that, and that's actually the first national survey that—that's a question that has commonly held sort of behind other positive attitudes about gay stuff. That one generally has often had fairly low numbers, and it was the first time that it started to get higher.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: Just quickly, the only thing I have that remotely comes close to your question, sir, is—and two of the messages tested in this national survey, one was, quote, "regardless of how you feel about same-sex marriage, raising children in a same-sex household is a bad idea. Do you agree or disagree?" Fifty-nine percent agree; 34 percent disagree. Another message: "Passing the Federal Marriage Amendment would be good for children and families." Fifty-seven percent agree; 34 percent disagree. So there is a margin of agreement versus disagreement, and with a little bit of intensity.

The only other thing I'd say about it is, remember that if the entire movement for homosexual rights outside of the marriage debate has centered on a relationship between consenting adults, it is more than just a one-step jump; it is a quantum leap for many people to then expand that into conferring the rights and privileges, including those of parenting, onto individuals who theretofore said that this was about consenting adults behind closed doors.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: We have time for a few more questions or comments. I think I'll—

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: I was just going to add one thing to the Gen X and Y debate, just because it came to my head. Another thing that the LA Times poll found among all adults—they found similar findings around the opposition to same-sex marriage; however, 59 percent said they thought same-sex marriage was inevitable.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: This area is very interesting from just kind of a polling geek perspective because over the last 20 years there have been massive changes on all of these questions, including the question of, you know, would you have a teacher—would you care if your kid was taught by a teacher who was gay, and if you look at other questions like women's rights or civil rights, that attitudinal change took a much longer—you know, in some cases 40 years—to get to a point where you have majorities of people saying a woman could be president.

And so I actually—I mean, that last result that you cited I think is right. I think we're seeing—I don't think the leap, Kellyanne, that you're talking about really is as big as you think it is, and I think that there is a—in some sense—you mentioned at the beginning that this entire thing has promoted sort of backlash that might hurt the same-sex marriage movement, to the extent that there is one. I mean, let's be clear: there are a lot of people in this community that—this isn't the fight they want to have right now. I actually think in some ways it's had the opposite effect because it has desensitized people to the issue. It seems inevitable, you know, when you look at kind of cultural changes in television and movies and sort of gay couple and gay characters on TV. It's becoming sort of just an acceptable way of life for a lot of people, the question of whether homosexuality should be an acceptable way of life. That question, people are evenly divided in this country on that question, which actually represents sort of huge progress.

So I actually think this debate is moving pretty quickly. I think it'll take a long time for kind of religious marriage—for people to think religious marriage is acceptable, but everything up to that I think is going to move very, very quickly based on what we've seen over the last 20 years.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: Then I look forward to the John Kerry platform that includes same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: That's a different issue.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: We have time for one more question. Could we get the mike?

THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: Just two kind of research questions, I guess for you, Ms. Greenberg, and maybe you can—first, do we know, on any of these polls, is the question asked about people, do you know personally someone who is gay or a gay couple?

And secondly, with regard to your first point about the unmarried women, which I think it is fascinating, that group being so much larger, what do they say about their wishes to marry still? Has that changed too?

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: Yes, the question of knowing someone who's gay is asked on a lot of surveys, and I'm going to fail here because I can't remember off the top of my head.

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: I can help you if you want.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: What is it?

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: The LA Times, it was—they asked that and I think it was between 76 and 80 percent, and it was a majority even among people who identified as conservative Christian.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: We asked in our demos—the question reads as follows: "Finally, do you personally know any homosexuals, gays or lesbians, including friends, relatives, co-workers or you yourself?" Seventy-four percent said yes, others; 3 percent, yes, me; 20 percent said no. It's a very high number.

THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: Has that changed?

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: I think it's gone up, yes.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: Oh, yes, it's gone up, but the interesting thing about it is that—

THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: How about parents?

GARY GATES, Urban Institute: They didn't ask that.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: But the interesting thing about that question is it's pretty strongly associated with having more progressive views about a whole range of different questions on gay rights, especially if it's someone in your family. And so as more and more people—again, this is part of, I think, a trend that is moving in this direction as more and more people know people who are gay their attitudes change, and I think that's an incredibly important development.

What was your question about unmarried women again?

THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: Unmarried women, what are their aspirations for marriage?

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: Well, I haven't—we didn't ask that question on the survey and I don't have any series data, but we did do about nine focus groups with unmarried women and we talked about this question a lot. And what's interesting is there is some percentage of unmarried women who are younger and want to get married and inevitably will get married, but there's also a fair number, at least in the focus groups, in this kind of qualitative sense of some—without trying to fuel Kellyanne's stereotypes about the women's movement—some hostility towards men, in part because a lot of the women are divorced or separated or been in situations where they have not been treated particularly well or they've got fathers who are not supporting their children. And there's, again, just in the qualitative sense, there were a lot of unmarried women in these focus groups who were pretty happy to be on their own, and pretty proud that they make it on their own.

THEODORA OOMS, Center for Law and Social Policy: I guess I was just talking about the never-married.

ANNA GREENBERG, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: I don't have any hard percentage on that.

KELLYANNE CONWAY, The Polling Company, Inc.: I do. Anna's firm and my firm have both done respective—just hordes of work in this area—hordes, H-O-R-D-E-S—(laughter)—of work in this area, so in talking about the subject I want to make myself clear for the audience—tons of work. We've both been quoted just way too much on this subject, frankly, this cycle already and we have five months to go.

We do ask those questions. The fact is that women, when they achieve what we call the four magic M's at some stage in their life—marriage, munchkins, mortgages, and mutual funds—women do tend to become much more conservative, much more Republican in their voting. The thing is, though, there are now more unmarried women then, but what makes this demographic fascinating is how many more there are now, and Anna pointed out to one in five prospective voters being unmarried women. It probably won't end up being actual voters, but that's a significant portion of the population.

What makes them different is that we're not just talking about widows anymore; we're talking about women who have deferred and in some cases denied altogether—deferred or denied—delayed, deferred, or denied altogether entering into the institution of marriage.

To answer your question, though, I think it goes beyond public opinion data and just cultural data. Do you think Jdate and Match.com exist in such force—all these matchmaking sites exist in such force because people don't have a friend to have a cup of coffee with? There still is a tremendous aspiration and natural impulse towards marriage for lots of young people. And I'm seeing, just in the difference between Generation X, again, the eldest of whom are, gosh, 1965—yeah, 39 and old —(laughter)— sorry, just kidding—and the youngest that are 25 or 26—these are not people like on roller blades with goatees sipping lattes and mourning Kurt Cobain on the 10th anniversary of his suicide; these are responsible adults who are buying their first homes and working their way through professional America, et cetera, raising children.

What I see as a difference between X and Y though, Y does not seem to be as reticent and hesitant about entering into marriage, and some of them are doing it younger now. The average age of first marriage is increasing for men and women. For men it's about 27.6 years, for women it's close to 25 now—like 24.9 or something years for first marriage, but you do see in some of these younger generations that I can have it all, I will do it all, and that includes marriage.

WENDY SWALLOW, American University: Well, thank you everyone. This has been fascinating. (Applause.)

(END)

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