Missoula Notebook

I Now Pronounce You Wrong

By Sutton Stokes, 6-19-08

Even though I’m a fancy-schmancy Web 2.0 citizen journalist, I still subscribe to the daily paper, mainly because I’ve been addicted to comics ever since I learned to read and there is no better way to read comics than in the pages of a daily newspaper.

Plus, if you get all your news on-line, there is no logical stopping point: link begets link begets link, and — before you know it — it’s 3 a.m. and you’ve gone from reading about vital issues like flag lapel pins or whether the Reverend Jeremiah Wright would make a good president to a Wikipedia article about anatomical euphemisms used in 16th-century pornographic texts.

With the Missoulian, by contrast, it’s just a quick seven minutes from front to back (unless you get hung up trying to figure out if Mallard Filmore cartoonist Bruce Tinsley is actually as mentally feeble as he usually comes off, or if he is just trying to get a rise out of you), and then you can move on to the rest of your day feeling like you’ve actually accomplished something.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m also a big fan of the letters to the editor. Sometimes they inspire, sometimes they infuriate, but it’s always interesting to get a sense of what’s on the so-called minds of your neighbors. Case in point: todays’ letter defending the institution of marriage, by Missoula resident Mike Dey (apparently not his first).

Mr. Dey’s letter is strange for a couple of reasons, but the thing that moved me to actually stir from my usual position stretched out full-length on the couch and boot up my computer was his use of a bizarre statistical anti-reasoning so innumerate (that’s the math version of illiterate) that it made my scalp itch.

Mr. Dey’s basic argument is that children whose parents are married are more likely to finish high school. This is probably true enough, since marriage and marriage-success rates are higher among people who have better employment prospects, which is to say that people with money or at least strong earning potential are more likely to get and stay married than people without. (This rule is often twisted around to support the false argument that simply getting married is a good way to increase your income, as if the only reason your boss hasn’t given you a raise yet is because he hasn’t noticed a ring on your finger.) In turn, educational achievement correlates so directly to family income that we could probably dispense with all of the No Child Left Behind standardized tests and just rank schools by parents’ median incomes.

So, yes, there is probably some statistical argument to be made that children of married parents are more likely to finish high school.

But you couldn’t prove it by the method Mr. Dey adopts. Reviewing the mini-features on 50 graduating “top seniors” (though Mr. Dey only counted 34) from area high schools, which ran in the Missoulian on June 7 (apparently not available on-line, sorry), he bases his conclusion on the fact that the majority of these pictured graduates have parents who share the same last name.

Overlooking the fact that having different last names does not necessarily mean two people aren’t married (a woman might keep the name she is known by professionally, while a friend of mine kept her first husband’s name even after she married her second husband, simply because she thought it was a really cool name), Mr. Dey apparently never considers the possibility that he might simply have discovered that most high school students in the area have married parents.

I mean, I hope I’m not the only one who immediately sees that Mr. Dey’s findings are only telling if there were equal numbers of students with married parents and without married parents in the first place. I suspect that there are in fact quite a lot fewer students without married parents, so it shouldn’t strike us as odd that there are quite a lot fewer of them graduating.

I don’t know if Mr. Dey is actually interested in facts, though, since he expresses in the opening of the letter his belief that there is some sort of campaign afoot to convince people that “marriage serves no useful purpose.” Sorry, but I don’t seem to have noticed the billboards and public speakers arguing against getting married, and I definitely never got the memo. Obviously Americans aren’t rushing into marriage the way they did during the 1950s, when marriage rates were abnormally higher than at any point in the country’s history, before or since, but you might tend to think that’s a good thing if you were actually interested in preventing divorces.

Besides, if marriage has really been made to seem so unattractive, why have so many people been lining up outside courthouses in California for the last couple of days, waiting to tie the knot? Oh, wait, I forgot: gay marriage is actually an assault on the institution, part of the master liberal plan to eliminate families, puppies and warm summer evenings.

I think I read about it in Mallard Filmore.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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