I found a chart online recently consisting of two pictures. The top picture had a map of the United States with states highlighted where gay marriage was legal: Massachusetts, Connecticut, Iowa, Vermont and New Hampshire. Pretty simple picture — five states. The picture below it was the same map but with a lot of states colored. That one? States where it’s legal to marry your first cousin.
Apparently, marriage between cousins is legal in Alabama, Alaska, California, Colorado, Connecticut, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia.
And with restrictions, it’s legal in Utah, Arizona, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina and Maine. As one Web site put it, that makes marrying your cousin 500 percent more legal than marrying someone of the same gender.
What struck me about this pairing of maps is that it makes an implicit argument. I always think of charts and maps as being objective, free from partisanship. I mean, get a Republican to show you a map of who voted for Obama, and it has to be the same as the Democrats’ map, right? So we can trust maps and make our decisions from there.
I never think of my opinion as being formed just by looking at the map. But as I looked at this chart, I had two impressions before I realized what I was thinking. First, I thought, “Wow, gay marriage really isn’t that popular.” But it’s not like I’ve taken a poll of all my friends and this map contradicts my polling. I’ve gotten my perception of how popular gay rights is based on the media. (It’s very impolite at UF to oppose gay marriage, you know.)
This made me feel a little manipulated. If I thought I was having a revelation looking at the chart, it wasn’t because it was a different source. It’s just that the facts and statistics were presented in a different light.
It started to make me wrestle with asking what light is best. But the light is pre-data; it’s how you’re going to view the information. Seems to me like you have to choose your position before you evaluate it, because the evaluating is affected by what your position is.
And that was only my first thought. My second thought looking at the pictures was, “Wouldn’t the gay rights activists be so excited if they could make gay marriage as popular as cousin marriage?” Now, maybe some readers are in love with their cousins, but I haven’t heard much from the cousin-rights people. In fact, I’d be embarrassed to even tell people if I married my cousin. And yet, gay rights groups would love to be only that offensive. Presented on the map, divorced from trends through time, it makes gay marriage appear 500 percent more distasteful than cousin marriage.
Maybe all my awareness of being influenced is just because I can’t figure out what to think about gay marriage. But it worries me that I have to decide before I can think about it. Wish me luck.
