Monday, June 22, 2009

Bogus data on gays

The San Jose Mercury News reported this story on page 1A a couple of days ago:
In the midst of the nation's widening debate over whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, the U.S. Census Bureau has quietly completed a statistical portrait of U.S. lesbian and gay couples who describe themselves as married.
Clayton Cramer explains:
There's a new study out showing Census data on married same-sex couples vs. married opposite-sex couples--and the results are quite surprising in how much they are alike. But Professor Dale Carpenter over at Volokh Conspiracy points out that the same-sex couples are so atypical of what we know from other studies that it is likely what is called a "miscoding error," where mistakes in recording sex on forms mean that many of those identified as same-sex married couples really aren't.
The newspaper has not published a correction, and neither has the US Census.

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