Formal Rights and Informal Privileges for Same-Sex Couples

Abstract

Attitudes toward gay rights have liberalized over the past few decades, but scholars know less about the extent to which individuals in the United States exhibit subtle forms of prejudice toward lesbians and gays. To help address this issue, we offer a conceptualization of formal rights and informal privileges. Using original data from a nationally representative survey experiment, we examine whether people distinguish between formal rights (e.g., partnership benefits) and informal privileges (e.g., public displays of affection) in their attitudes toward same-sex couples. Results show that heterosexuals are as willing to extend formal rights to same-sex couples as they are to unmarried heterosexual couples. However, they are less willing to grant informal privileges. Lesbians and gays are more willing to extend formal rights to same-sex couples, but they too are sometimes more supportive of informal privileges for heterosexual couples. We also find that heterosexuals’ attitudes toward marriage more closely align with their attitudes toward informal privileges than formal rights, whereas lesbians and gays view marriage similarly to both formal rights and informal privileges. Our findings highlight the need to examine multiple dimensions of sexual prejudice to help understand how informal types of prejudice persist as minority groups receive formal rights.

Measurement, methods, and divergent patterns: Reassessing the effects of same-sex parents

“…5 Others have questioned Regnerus's reliance on internet surveys collected by Knowledge Networks, now GfK (Sherkat, 2012); however, the quality of data collected from internet surveys completed by a nationally representative, probability-based survey web panel is comparable to that of other data collection efforts that also rely on random digit dialing (Chang and Krosnick, 2009). Despite some limitations to internet surveys of this type-or, for that matter, surveys in general-it bears pointing out these surveys have been productively used in sociological scholarship on family and relationships (Doan et al, 2014;Rosenfeld and Thomas, 2012;Seltzer et al, 2012). 6 Response rates from Knowledge Networks/GfK are similar to the industry norms.…”

Partner Characteristics and Perceptions of Responsibility for Housework and Child Care

“…We do not distinguish between gay men and lesbians in our hypotheses because little research on housework has incorporated same‐sex couples (but see Goldberg, ). We make this distinction in the results, however, because scholars are increasingly pointing to differences in perceptions and experiences of gay and lesbian couples (Doan, Loehr, & Miller, ; B. Powell et al, ; Weisshaar, ).…”

Attitudes Toward Parenthood, Partnership, and Social Rights for Diverse Families: Evidence From a Pilot Study in Five Countries

“…On the other hand, the various studies focusing on attitudes toward homosexuality (e.g., Hooghe & Meeusen, 2013;Kuntz, Davidov, Schwartz, & Schmidt, 2015;Kuyper et al, 2013;Takács & Szalma, 2013;van den Akker, van der Ploeg and Scheepers, 2013) or marriage and alternative forms of family formation (Treas, Lui, & Gubernskaya, 2014) have tended to address the general acceptance of "diverse family forms" or "diverse individuals" without addressing the issue of citizenship rights attached to this diversity. Exceptions to this include studies providing insights into attitudes toward the rights of same-sex couples in the United States (Doan, Loehr, & Miller, 2014;Miller & Chamberlain, 2013), Portugal (Costa et al, 2014), and Sweden and Norway (Jakobsson, Kotsadam, & Jakobsson, 2013). Yet few studies address attitudes toward parenthood rights or the issue of social rights for LGBT individuals or for alternative family forms, and almost none consider cross-national variation in these attitudes.…”