What Happens When Privilege Boundaries are Falling? Declining Marriage Rates in Counties that Most Strongly Resisted Marriage Equality

Abstract

From 1998 to 2008, conservative activists placed initiatives on ballots in 30 states seeking preemptively to ban marriage for LGBTQ couples. They succeeded in every state, commonly with lopsided vote tallies. We examine what has happened to marriage rates in communities where those battles took place, as beliefs pertaining to marriage equality became more progressive in the nation as a whole and as state-level bans soon fell under the weight of state legislation and state and federal judicial rulings. Counterintuitively, we find that marriage rates have declined the most in communities where opposition to marriage equality was strongest in the early 2000s—so much so, in fact, that they are now indistinguishable from marriage rates in communities where opposition to marriage equality was weaker.