Babbling Blueberry

Congratulations to all the newly married and newly licensed couples in California! Have long and happy and healthy marriages!

As for those counties in California that have stopped performing ceremonies to protest the legalization of same sex marriages: Shame on you! This is the sort of thing that bratty kids do. Like when I was younger, I was on a swim team and at the end of the season, they gave everyone a blue gym bag. My younger sister wanted the bag and I must have been forced to give it to her. Rather than give it to her, I cut the bag up with a pair of scissors. So she couldn’t use it. Neither could I. I’m more mature now. And I realize now that if I didn’t cut that bag up, I could still use it now. And she could use it as well.

Maybe something positive can come out of these “protests.” Maybe there are some people have not supported same sex marriage in the past, but if they experience more hurdles to getting married themselves, they will understand what it has been like for same sex couples. And what it is still like for same sex couples in most of the U.S. These counties haven’t completely banned marriages or the issuing of licenses, so it may take more for people to come around to realizing what it is like to have rights given to others and then denied to them.

Kudos to those ministers who will show up outside the Kern county clerk’s office and perform marriage ceremonies anyway. That’s awesome!

You’ve probably heard these stats before. From a NYTimes article about division of labor in couples:

“Social scientists know in remarkable detail what goes on in the average American home. And they have calculated with great precision how little has changed in the roles of men and women… break out the couples in which both husband and wife have full-time paying jobs. There, the wife does 28 hours of housework and the husband, 16. Just shy of two to one, which makes no sense at all.

The lopsided ratio holds true however you construct and deconstruct a family. “Working class, middle class, upper class, it stays at two to one,” says Sampson Lee Blair, an associate professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo who studies the division of labor in families.”

And then later on in the same article, there’s this stat that I haven’t seen before:

“Lesbian parents, gay parents and heterosexual fathers all look the same on paper when it comes to cooking and cleaning — they all report doing between 6 and 10 hours a week.”

Assuming these numbers are all based on sound and controlled studies, I can see two possible scenarios for all these conclusions to make sense together.

1. Heterosexual households are cleaner than same sex households because these households see 50% more housework.
2. Heterosexual fathers (I’m using fathers because the stat in the article refers to fathers) contribute more net dirtiness to a household and that negates the extra housecleaning done by heterosexual mothers.

(It’s also possible that heterosexual mothers are less efficient with their housework, but I find that an unlikely explanation for a number of reasons - women probably are trained more from a young age to do housework; lesbian parents and gay parents don’t do different amounts of housework; if women have more time pressures, they’ll likely have more pressure to be more efficient.)

Are there any studies on the relative cleanliness of different households? That would be a way to see which scenario is true. I have a hunch that the prize is behind door #2, but I’m not going to say anything for sure or why I have this hunch until there’s more info. Anybody who knows of such a study or is willing to conduct one?

Is the list of explanations longer than 2?

This is actually a really interesting article with a lot of other interesting points. I’ll probably wind up posting more entries about this article. But if you want to check it out before I get to writing those entries, I highly recommend it.