More from Pin[ar]ello on Scalia

[dpinello at jjay.cuny.edu]

I respond to comments on my empirical exercise regarding Justice 
Scalia.

1. Professor Volokh's question about the empirical evidence to 
demonstrate that "gay and lesbian" is preferred to "homosexual" by 
people in that community is characteristically trenchant.  
Unfortunately, the entire relevant population cannot be observed 
effectively, as Riggle and Tadlock (1999) explain:

"The most difficult part of research directly investigating gays and 
lesbians is identifying lesbians and gays.  The gay and lesbian 
population is 'invisible.'  Whether a researcher meets someone face to 
face, makes phone contact, or gives out anonymous confidential 
questionnaires, that researcher remains at the mercy of the 
participant to self-identify as lesbian or gay."

However, substantial collateral evidence of the preference exists.  
For instance, for my upcoming book on the politics of same-sex 
marriage, I interviewed 50 married same-sex couples in California, 
Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Oregon who were selected 
as randomly as the just-mentioned identification limitation allows.  
My recollection is that every one of the 100 people in those 
interviews self-identified as "gay" or "lesbian" and not 
as "homosexual."  Other confirmations are available but I won't 
belabor the point.

2. Regardless of the resolution in "1," however, the fact remains that 
Justice Scalia's behavior on the issue is an extreme outlier.

Consider the additional evidence offered by the three dissenting 
opinions in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.  Certainly no 
one can reasonably question the fidelity of those state justices' 
allegiance to the legal and constitutional arguments opposing what the 
majority did in Goodridge regarding same-sex marriage.  One can 
sensibly assume that Justice Scalia would approve of the dissents.  
Yet the preferred-reference ratio for the three Goodridge dissents is 
7/7, or 1.00 -- a rate more than one hundred times greater than 
Scalia's!

3.  To conserve space in my original post, I alluded to the counting 
rules that determined the ratios reported there.  To respond to 
Professor Volokh's comment that only "gay and lesbian" is equivalent 
to "homosexual," I note that the overwhelming number of justices' 
references indeed were to "gay and lesbian," but I counted each such 
reference only once (not twice).

4. In an off-list reply, Michael Besso corrected an interpretation 
error in my original post:

"There is a difference between your 'preferred reference' ratio and 
the percentage of usage. In the Grutter example, the preferred 
reference ratio might very well be 15:42 (roughly 1:3), but that does 
not mean that Justices used the preferred reference 36 percent of the 
time -- it means they used it 26 percent of the time. That is: in 15 
preferred uses out of 57 total uses = .263."

I thank him for the correction.

5. I was greatly amused by Mark Graber's observation that someone on 
the list in effect wants to make me more Italian than I already am.

Dan Pin[ar]ello

P.S.  If anyone is interested in a recent paper ("What a Difference a 
Court Decision Makes: Same-Sex Marriage and Goodridge") based on my 
book's research, it's available online at:

http://www.danpinello.com/APSA2005.htm