The Anti-Social Effects of Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage: Fact or Fiction?

Abstract

Previous research examines the effects of same-sex marriage on many child and family outcomes, but only a small subset examines the effects of laws on those outcomes. We evaluate the effects of same-sex marriage legalization in the USA on four socio-familial outcomes. We use currently available public data from the U.S. Census and CDC to analyze changes in state-level legalization of same-sex marriage on rates of child poverty, divorce, marriage, and children living in single-parent households within each state from 2011 to 2016. The estimators use traditional cross-sectional time-series methodologies, along with adjusting for high-dimensional fixed-effects (HDFE) clustering to account for both spatial and temporal dependence of state-time observations. We find no evidence to validate claims of negative ramifications from same-sex marriage legalization on these outcomes. With respect to the arguments articulated in Supreme Court amici briefs, we show that assertions of negative social effects of legalized same-sex marriage are largely unsupported. In addition to illustrating the gains from HDFE estimators, we conclude that warnings of likely negative effects from same-sex marriage, such as disallowing adoption by same-sex couples, are not credible.