Daily Read: Deirdre Bowen on DOMA and Empiricism

Does the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) accomplish the purpose of defending opposite-sex marriage?  This question, or at least some version of it, is at the heart of the Supreme Court's consideration of United States v. Windsor, as well as of Hollingsworth v. Perry to the extent that Prop 8 is considered a state DOMA.

In a new article, I Wanna Marry You: An Empirical Analysis of the Irrelevance and Distraction of DOMAs, available in draft on ssrn, LawProf Deirdre Bowen (pictured) argues that the numbers simply don't add up to providing support for the proposition. 

As her central task, Bowen takes as her comparators states with DOMAs, including constitutional amendments and statutes,  and states without DOMAs  and examines their marriage and divorce rates from 1999-2010 to discover whether DOMA correlates with marital stability and strength.   Her analysis "suggests that DOMA states do not fare any better than non-DOMA states in terms of the strengthening  marriage" and in fact, "DOMA states tend to have lower marriage rates, larger declines in the trend towards marriage, and greater divorce rates."

Her empirical query answered, Bowen the contends that not only is DOMA irrelevant, it serves as a distraction from the real threats that certain economic and social policies pose to family stability, especially with regards to children.  Whatever the Court decides, she implies, will not be sufficient to solve the problem of family volatility.

RR