From the Boston Globe:
In the first week after the Supreme Judicial Court decision took effect on May 17, 2,500 gay and lesbian couples applied for licenses; 1,700 have done so in the six months since then, according to unofficial tallies by the Globe and state officials. In all, the state’s Registry of Vital Records has received an estimated 4,266 marriage licenses for gay and lesbian couples, a spokeswoman said yesterday.The City of Boston has experienced a significant slowdown. In the week after May 17, Boston reported 146 same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses, but in the six months since, 345 gay and lesbian couples have applied, an average of 14 a week, according to the Globe’s survey.
The story is similar in Cambridge, which opened City Hall doors after midnight May 17 to accept license applicants. During that first week, 310 same-sex couples applied for licenses in Cambridge, the most in the state. But in the months since, only 267 same-sex couples have applied, an average of about 11 a week.
Applying Occam’s Razor, this leaves one of two possibilities. Either homosexuals – as I have always suspected – are rather less interested in their so-called civil rights than was portrayed by a pro-lavender media, or there are simply fewer than homosexual activists would have us believe.
If one leaves out the obvious statistical outlier of the first week, that leaves 1766 “marriage” licenses. Multiplied by two, that’s an expected 3,532 homosexual couples joined in unholy “matrimony” representing 6.6 percent of the number of total marriages based on the national average. That’s about halfway between the 2 percent I would have expected, and the 10 percent that the lavendar lobby claims.
Different reasons could explain the current numbers, of course. The number rises to 8.7 percent if one compares it to the total number of marriages in Massachusetts, but then, I do nont know how many of these couples are actually residents of Massachusetts. If Massachusetts has become the gay Las Vegas, these numbers are incredibly low, otherwise, if Massachusetts is an unusually gay state, they might explain Massachusetts’ historically low marriage rate. It’s too soon to tell for sure, but it’s a statistic which should provide some interesting information in the years ahead.