CT Blue

Yesterday I noted that Utah was in the anomalous position of leading the nation in one measure of sanity: it has the lowest smoking rate in the country. This is an example of the stopped clock effect. It's a state controlled by a religious sect, so for the most part the people there are bat shit crazy, but they don't believe in smoking, so like a stopped clock…

Anyway, Utah has now proven beyond doubt that the smoking measure was an outlier; that it does indeed belong firmly in the camp of the stupid. It has done this not just statistically (we'll get to that later), but in a legal brief filed in a federal court, opposing gay marriage.

In their opening brief in support of Utah’s appeal of a ruling that the state’s ban on same-sex marriages is unconstitutional, the Beehive State’s lawyers argued Monday that one reason to avoid marriage equality was the “correlation between genderless marriage and lower birthrates.” […]
It is also striking that fertility and birthrates tend to be markedly lower in nations and states that have embraced same-sex marriage. For example, the birthrate in states (and Washington, D.C.) that have adopted a genderless marriage definition is significantly lower than the national average. In fact, the six lowest birthrate states have all adopted that redefinition, while none of the nine highest birthrate states have done so.
In a footnote, the attorneys reference the Centers for Disease Control’s National Vital Statistics Reports – Births: Final Data for 2012, which identified the six states with the lowest birthrates in that year were Connecticut (10.2 live births per 1,000 estimated population), Maine (9.6), Massachusetts (10.9), New Hampshire (9.4), Rhode Island (10.4), and Vermont (9.6). The states with highest birthrates in that report Texas (14.7) and Utah (18.0).

via Daily Kos

Now, I think we can all concede that it is vitally important that people be born, but it is not at all clear that they should be born at quite the rate at which they are born in Texas, particularly because the people born in Texas, for the most part, grow up to be Texans. But even the Texans are outdone by the people of Utah, who are inflicting new Mormons on the world at a pace that is truly worrisome.

Once again, we sane people lead the way. We are replacing ourselves, but prefer not to inflict surplus people on the world, and those we do inflict are likely to be …well….smarter than those inflicted on a long suffering world by the people of Texas and Utah.

It should come as no surprise that, while the correlation Utah's lawyers cite exists, it is not at all clear it has anything to do with whether gay marriage is legal or not. It once again appears to more closely correlate along red state/blue state lines, with our fair New England once again at the top of the sanity pack. Why am I not surprised?