Marriage, Biology, and Federal Benefits
This Article approaches the topic of same-sex marriage from a novel perspective by scrutinizing the historical accuracy of primary defense proffered by same-sex marriage opponents – “responsible procreation.” In the context of challenges to Section 3 of DOMA, responsible procreation posits that the federal government’s historic purpose in extending marital benefits is to single out and specially support families with biologically-related children. Because same-sex couples cannot fulfill this long-standing purpose, it is permissible to deny them all federal marital rights and obligations. While advocates disagree about whether and to what extent DOMA furthers this alleged federal interest, to date, all sides have accepted this historical account.This Article is the first to interrogate the accuracy of this account. To do so, the Article examines two of the largest and most important federal benefits programs – Social Security benefits and benefits for active and retired members of the U.S. military. This analysis demonstrates that Congress has not and does not condition the receipt of federal family-based benefits on biological parent-child relationships. To the contrary, Congress long has implicitly and explicitly extended such benefits to families with children known to be biologically unrelated to one or both of their parents. This Article thus reveals that responsible procreation is based on myth, not history and tradition.
Understanding Single Womanhood in China: An Intersectional Perspective
Over the past few decades, the marriage rate has been decreasing across the globe and the populations of the singles have been rapidly increasing. Despite such significant changes, marriage norms remain strong throughout the world. Drawing on the intersectionality theory, this chapter presents an interlocking matrix of oppressions for single womanhood. Based on extensive literature review on single womanhood, the authors argue that multiple stigmas, including singlism, sexism, ageism, classism, as well as racism/ethnicity-based biases, all contribute to the negative experiences of single women across different cultural contexts. The oppressions occur on multiple levels, as results of the interaction across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. The proposed matrix is later elaborated in the context of Chinese society to demonstrate its applicability. The chapter ends with a discussion of the potential to advance knowledge about gender inequity and to provide an informed framework for improving single womanhood.
Evidence of spurious results along with spatially autocorrelated errors in the context of geographically weighted regression for two independent SAR(1) processes
AbstractThe aim of this paper is to examine the performance of the geographically weighted regression (GWR) technique in terms of recognizing linear relationships at the local level. Using a Monte Carlo analysis with two independent spatially autocorrelated SAR(1) processes, this study finds that spurious behavior exists at the local level along with spatially autocorrelated errors. Therefore, GWR estimation results must be interpreted with caution.
