Google GIS 7: Blog

Throughout this project, we tried to find out how gay marriage affected the population growths and declines in both Alabama and California. Since California is such a liberal state normally when elections are held, we thought that the population would change drastically because they were well on their way to legalizing gay marriage. This was somewhat of the case, but not completely. As for Alabama, it is basically always conservative when voting. While there are gay and lesbian couples in Alabama they do not out-weigh the couples of opposite sexes. Our group has focused and started the process of finding information to construct data sets and embed ideas into our maps. We looked to see how jobs, laws and rights with marriage, and population changes would be affected by gay marriage.

Throughout the project, we focused mainly on using different censuses, along with fact finder and Google. We found out through our maps that there were not really very many drastic changes within the populations. California is already so densely populated in certain areas that they did not have an increase larger than six percent per one county. It was evident through this information that there would not be such a huge change in population as we had originally thought. The population increased in both California and Alabama, but it does not seem that these laws were the reason why. Different people from each state changed their minds of different aspects of the state’s views, and they went to other states where they were more pleased with how things were going. Not only were they different in laws, but in taxes and jobs as well.

            For many years as we all know, the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy about your sexual preference was in place in the army. It is almost like the same policy was implemented in the workforce and other places throughout the country. Until recently, there have been very few polls and ratios of what other’s sexual orientations were and it was hard to obtain. It has become more common since the last census was taken for people to say what their sexual preference is.  We began to look into major cities in each state, such as Montgomery, AL and Los Angeles, CA, as well as counties in each state. We did a county population, men to women ratios, and took a look into the struggles and benefits of the workforce. It was evident in some places that there was fifty-fifty trade off of both men and women being equal. Almost all of the counties increased in both states, but in Alabama some of the poorer places decreased, because they were forced to move elsewhere because of the inability to find a stable job.

We wanted to track the differences between laws and jobs and how they have changed over the past ten years, but it was impossible to find information on just jobs and laws in a numbers format. As most people know, over the last ten years we have experienced a depression, one of which is the second worse ever of our country, along with a recession. Throughout the recession men were laid off from their jobs in big corporate companies and forced to either take minimalist jobs, or not work at all. This made it easier for women to get the men’s jobs because they were so down and out about losing their jobs in the first place. Some women did not have jobs due to being a stay at home mom, and were forced to get them when the economy crashed. Everything we have read about during 2007 and 2008 was basically about how much everybody was struggling and not able to take care of their families, or even themselves.

As we mentioned before, we were searching for answers about laws with gay marriage. Although we were unable to find anything statistically, we did find some interesting things that people wrote about it. The newest and biggest argument is that same sex couples should be allowed to have tax benefits and health insurance together, just like heterosexual couples. They do the same things that heterosexual couples do when it comes to having families, paying bills, and sending children to school, but when they are ready to file taxes they cannot claim each other. By not being able to claim one another, it discourages them in not only funds for them, but also in reality. “Many benefits are only available to married couples, such as hospital visitation during an illness, taxation and inheritance rights, access to family health coverage, and protection in the event of the relationship ending. An October 2, 2009 analysis by the  New York Times estimates that a same sex couple denied marriage benefits will incur an additional $41,196 to $467,562 in expenses over their lifetime compared to a married heterosexual couple” (gaymarriage.procon.org). 

Although we were unable to find out more information statistically, we have found out that more and more laws are going before Congress each day. While this is a developing conflict, it seems that it will probably be resolved in the next ten or less years. The fights for gay rights are getting more and more intense globally, and we could talk for days about the different articles we have read on the internet about conflicts in Russia and other countries, but if anything is going to be resolved it seems that the United States of America will be the first. If we had to guess, we would say that gay marriage would be nationally recognized by no later than 2025. While many people do not agree with it still, it will probably happen because the fight has gotten so intense. If we were to be doing this project five years from now, the statistics would be completely different from what we have found completing it now. The statistics we did find showed that in the next few years everything will more than likely be completely different due to political changes in offices not only locally, but at state and national levels as well.

Below is one of the articles that we read, although we didn't use it, it has some very interesting information that we found to be helpful with this project. http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12614608

Also, this website had many interesting articles that we read and found helpful. http://gaymarriage.procon.org/