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UMass Prestige Used to Spin a False Story This Morning that State Economy Will Benefit from Gay Marriage
By MassNews Staff

       This month three University of Massachusetts professors published a report claiming that legalizing gay marriage in this state has benefited the local economy some $150 million. 
       The timing of the report in itself is suspect: just as legislators are beginning a new session that will include a vote on the removal of Chief Justice Marshall.  The biggest problem with the report is that for all the research that went into the study, their own statistics don’t support their conclusion.
       Despite all that, no newspaper apparently has the staff or desire to examine the report or its conclusions.

The Truth about the Report
       Professors Randy Albelda, M.V. Lee Badgett, and Michael Ash conclude in the latest issue of “Massachusetts Benchmarks” that the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision legalizing gay marriage will generate the revenue from resident gay marriages, out-of-state couples coming in to tie the knot, and state savings from couples that were living together, and will have certain state benefits terminated when they are officially married.
       The authors’ figures are based on the assumption that about 8,550, or half of the gay couples living in state will marry here this year. An additional 16,600 out-of-state gay couples will also come to the Bay State for their nuptials.   That is a total of over 25,000 weddings.
       The problem that seems to defy these researchers is that less than one-fifth of that number actually have married here, and the number of new same sex marriage applicants has dwindled to nearly zero.  This week, Cheryl Jacques, former president of the Human Rights Campaign, boasted that “over 4,000 couples” had married in Massachusetts.  Using the ratio of the out-of-state to local residents getting married provided by the study, it is likely that the number of in-state gay couples that got married is closer to 1,500, with the rest being from out-of-state. 
       Another “fuzzy math” dimension to the study was the assumption that since a typical wedding in Massachusetts cost between $20,000 and  $24,000, that those figures would be a fair estimate for all the same-sex weddings in the state.  This is not the case.  There were certainly a few high profile marriages that met or exceeded that estimate, but for most of the accounts of local marriages, they tended to be low profile, private events.   For many, the only big celebration was the three-layered cake provided by the City of Cambridge on May 17, 2004.  The largest amount of revenue that came with the legalization of gay marriage may have been the hotel and motel bills from out-of-state couples on the Cape.  Realistically, the average cost of weddings, including room and board for out-of-state couple may be one-tenth of what the researchers were presuming. 
        The last fiscal benefit to the state the researchers cited was savings in state benefits that would realized when a couple got married, and their joint income raised them above the threshold for state aid. Using some common sense, wouldn’t it be far more likely, that benefits paid out by the state will increase?  If there were two women partners, and one was on food stamps and the other from a similar socioeconomic standing but not qualified for food stamps, their marriage is more likely going to result in a “family” (which has a higher income threshold) going on food stamps, rather than the first woman getting removed from the program.   This is even more likely when discussing Medicaid.  Certainly, there will be couples that got married just because they could extend their state benefits to their gay partner.  If it were truly a matter of losing benefits, a gay couple would certainly opt not to marry.
       Overall, the “study” by Albelda, Badgett and Ash is a startling example of cognitive dissonance.  Even though their figures are based on 25,000 gay couples marrying in the state this year, they acknowledge, seemingly without seeing the contradiction that less than 5,000 have actually applied for licenses in May.  Perhaps the only viable explanation is that with the prospects of an upcoming vote to remove Chief Justice Marshall and vacating the gay marriage ruling, they are trying to convince legislators that the state has benefited from the ruling. 
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