Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution has an interesting hypothesis about who among married or marriage-inclined heterosexuals does and does not support gay marriage.

The interesting question is why there is so much opposition to legal gay marriage (which I favor).  You can cite various evil opponents and their evil motives, but there are many good people who aren’t all that enthusiastic about the idea.

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I have a simple hypothesis about the cross-sectional econometrics.  If you take the heterosexual couples who engage in the practice which is sometimes “associated” with male gay marriage, I predict those couples will favor legal gay marriage to an astonishingly high degree.  Their marriage is already “affiliated” with that practice, and so the notion of legally married gay men (and the practices which go along with that) does not constitute an extra and unwanted affiliation for their marriage ideal.

He said it here.

In a way it doesn’t matter exactly which “practice which is sometimes ‘associated’ with male gay marriage” he means. Although since he’s being so indirect I assume it’s something like fellatio or maybe ass play instead of more obviously common-to-both practices such as setting up wedding-gift registries at Target or working in the yard on weekends.

But if it doesn’t matter what practice he means it remains a good point. Even if they were generally tolerant and of good faith, couples that believed sex should be strictly limited to PIV intercourse when and only when reproduction is intended might also be anywhere from baffled (“but why would they want to have sex if they can’t reproduce”) to outraged. And meanwhile even conservative hetero couples who aren’t adherents of the other Victorian fetish (missionary/PIV-only/reproduction-only/lights-out/female-orgasm-denial) aren’t baffled by the appeal and so are more sanguine about the prospect of other people wanting to do it too. Whatever the mysterious “it” turned out to be.

Just because it’s logical doesn’t mean its true. But as hypotheses about social attitudes go it’s testable with off the shelf data gathering and analysis methods.

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Note: it’s possible I’m just being oblivious and everyone else but me knows what “‘associated’ practice” Cowen’s talking about.

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Update: See also the eternally pragmatic Matt Yglesias “...the more people see gay equality in practice, the less frightening it looks.” Which supports from the other direction my hunch that those mysterious “associated practices” really will turn out to be things like shared interest in gift registries and yard work.