A matter of perspective

I imagine many people are familiar with the work of Julian Beever, an English artist famous for his chalk drawings which spring to three dimensional life off the sidewalks of Europe, Australia, and the US.  You’d never guess, for example, that something like this

was a chalk drawing at first blush.  It’s amazingly three dimensional.

But it’s all a matter of perspective.  If you’re at a different angle, the drawing looks like this:

 

What a difference perspective makes.

With that in mind I note the recent news reports that Carolyn Conrad and Kathleen Peterson, the first same sex couple to receive a civil union in Vermont, have filed for divorce. 

Apparently divorce is just fine with religious conservatives as long as it affects same sex couples.  There’s some triumphant crowing going on in the blogosphere.  ”Of course” these couples will split.

But how successful are the gay relationships?  Buried in the newspaper article are some figures.  From July 2000 through the end of 2004, there have been 7549 filings for civil unions, and 78 filings for dissolution. 

That’s a one percent divorce rate folks.

Of course, not all couples live in Vermont, and they can’t track everybody.  But if we limit the sampling to the 1137 confirmed Vermont residents, that’s a seven percent divorce rate.

Rates like that put the heterosexual majority to shame. 

A few other comments:

AMERICAblog

Seems we can teach the extremist hate groups a few things about family values. This is a data point that people should be using all around the country to defeat those constitutional amendments and any anti “civil union” legislation.

Pam’s House Blend looks at the following numbers:

The Barna Research Group’s national study showed that members of nondenominational churches divorce 34 percent of the time in contrast to 25 percent for the general population. Nondenominational churches would include large numbers of Bible churches and other conservative evangelicals. Baptists had the highest rate of the major denominations: 29 percent. Born-again Christians’ rate was 27 percent. To make matters even more distressing for believers, atheists/agnostics had the lowest rate of divorce 21 percent.

She’s right, 54 months of civil unions isn’t a lot of data, but the comparison is interesting nevertheless.

The data are still coming in and it’s obviously inconclusive, but it’s interesting to see that people see what they choose to, often in spite of what is.