Hi, Mike-

I understand that you're currently the online editor of Vanity Fair, and I wanted to get in touch to see if you'd be interesting in receiving some queries from me or perhaps have something you'd like to assign.

I'm a Brooklyn-based freelance writer and author, and my work has appeared in National Lampoon, Skeptic, McSweeney's, The Onion A.V. Club, Nerve, and dozens of other publications, including trade, literary, regional, and policy journals. My first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, was released in 2007 to praise from Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, Cenk Uyger of Air America Radio, Bob Cesca of The Huffington Post, and other sources. I've also served as a copywriter for outlets like America Online.

I've pasted a recent sample below; it's an article that will be appearing in the next issue of Skeptic.



Thanks,



Barrett Brown

Brooklyn, NY

512-560-2302



Adventures in Math and Marriage

by Barrett Brown



Does the legalization of gay marriage really contribute to the decline of heterosexual marriage? A good portion of our fair republic's cultural conservatives seem to believe that it does, which is to say that it probably doesn't. But perhaps we should check anyway.

"[I]n the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get married," evangelical kingpin James Dobson told a typically credulous Larry King in November of 2006. "It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater numbers," he continued, although obviously homosexuals are indeed marrying in greater numbers since that number used to be zero and is now something greater than zero, "it's that when you confuse what marriage is, young people just don't get married."



If what James Dobson says is true, New Jersey is going to be in huge trouble, and Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must already be. Of course, James Dobson is wrong. But whereas James Dobson generally contents himself with simply being wrong in his priorities, sensibilities, instincts, historical perspective, theology, and manners – which is to say, wrong in a mystical, cloudy sort of way – he has here managed to be wrong in such a blatant sense that his wrongness can be demonstrated with mathematical exactitude. In fact, we should go ahead and do that. It'll be like an adventure - a math adventure.



First, let's prepare our variables. X is any country "where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," as Dobson manages to term these nations with just a little clarification from us. Y is the all-important marriage rate among heterosexuals before country X has "tried to define marriage [to include gay couples]," and Z is the all-important and allegedly damning heterosexual marriage rate that exists after ten years of gay civil unions. Now, the Dobson Theorem, as we shall call it, plainly states that "if X, then Y must be greater than Z." Or, to re-translate it into English, "if a nation allows for civil unions, the marriage rate among heterosexuals at the time that this occurs will be higher than it is ten years later," because the marriage rate among heterosexuals will of course decline for some reason.



Let us now test this Grand Unified Dobson Theorem, as I re-named it just a second ago when you weren't looking. Now, like most things with variables, the Grand Unified Christological Dobson Super-Theorem of Niftiness (which needed more pizazz) requires that X be substituted for various things that meet the parameters of X – in this case, northern European countries. Luckily, Dr. Dobson himself has provided us with some. During the Larry King interview, Dobson mentioned Norway and "other Scandinavian countries" as fitting the description. We'll also need values to punch in for Y and Z. These may be obtained from all of the countries in question, which have famously nosy, busy-body governments.



Conveniently enough, these numbers may also be obtained from the October 26th edition of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. It seems that William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver professor of jurisprudence at Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York investment banker, had recently written a book called Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've Learned From the Evidence, and had chosen to present the thrust of their findings in op-ed form.



Denmark, the authors noted, began allowing for gay civil unions in 1989. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 10.7 percent. Norway did the same in 1993. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 12.7 percent. Sweden followed suite in 1995. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 28.7 percent. And these marriages were actually lasting. During the same time frame, the divorce rate dropped 13.9 percent in Denmark, 6 percent in Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden.



As the Reader will no doubt have determined at this point, the Dobson Theorem or whatever it is that we've decided to call it is obviously bunk, since it stated that countries which allow gay civil unions will see a decline in the marriage rate among homosexuals, when in fact the opposite is true. But since we've already gone to the trouble of expressing Dobson's goofy utterances in the form of a theorem (or rather, since I've gone to the trouble – you were no help at all), we might as well punch in these figures just to make absolutely sure:



if X, then Y will be greater than Z



We punch in Denmark for X, Denmark's marriage rate in 1989 (n) for Y, and Denmark's marriage rate in 1999 (n + n(10.7)) for Z:



If Denmark, then n will be greater than n + n(10.7)



Well, that's obviously wrong, since n is not a greater number than n plus any other positive number. It is, in fact, a smaller number. If Denmark's policies reduce marriage, the residents of Denmark have yet to realize this and act accordingly.



Where is Dobson getting his information from this time? The culprit in this case may be Weekly Standard and National Review gadfly Stanley Kurtz, who took issue with Garver and Eskridge's preliminary findings back in 2004, before they were published (in fact, Kurtz weirdly dismisses them as "unpublished" not once but twice in the course of his article; now that they have appeared more formally, Kurtz will no doubt praise them as "published"). Confronted with statistics indicating that marriage in Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed that "Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to."



Brushing aside numbers showing that Danish marriage was up ten percent from 1990 to 1996, Kurtz countered that "just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark." He failed to note that they were down in 2001 for quite a few places, including the United States, which of course had no civil unions anywhere in 2001. And having not yet had access to the figures, he couldn't have known that both American and Scandinavian rates went back up in 2002. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate "has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples 'catching up.'" It's unclear exactly how old these "older couples" may be, but at any rate, Kurtz thinks their marriages simply don't count, and in fact constitute a sign of "the institution's decline." So Kurtz's position is that Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are younger people getting married at a higher rate, but older people are as well. I don't know what Kurtz's salary is, but I'm sure it would piss me off to find out.



Kurtz also wanted us to take divorce. "Take divorce," Kurtz wrote. "It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married." This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a much lower divorce rate than the United States as a percentage of married couples, a method of calculation that makes the size of the married people pool irrelevant. Denmark's percentage is 44.5, while the United States is at 54.8. Incidentally, those numbers come from the Heritage Foundation, which also sponsors reports on the danger that gay marriage poses to the heterosexual marriage rate.



Still, Kurtz is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of wedlock. "About 60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents," he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of second-born children who have unmarried parents, because that percentage is lower and would thus indicate that Scandinavian parents often marry after having their first child, as Kurtz himself later notes in the course of predicting that this will no longer be the case as gay civil unions continue to take their non-existent toll on Scandinavian marriage.



Since the rate by which Scandinavian couples have children before getting married has been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do with gay marriage – unless, of course, you happen to be Stanley Kurtz. "Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing." Of course it was more disturbing to Kurtz. By the mid-'90s, the Scandinavians had all instituted civil unions, and thus even the clear, long-established trajectory of such a trend as premature baby-bearing can be laid at the feet of the homos simply by establishing some arbitrary numerical benchmark that was obviously going to be reached anyway, calling this milestone "in many ways more disturbing," and hinting that all of this is somehow the fault of the gays. By the same token, I can prove that the establishment of the Weekly Standard in 1995 has contributed to rampant world population growth. Sure, that population growth has been increasing steadily for decades, but the push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was "in many ways more disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I can't quite pin down. Of course, this is faulty reasoning – by virtue of its unparalleled support for the invasion of Iraq, the Weekly Standard has actually done its part to keep world population down.



Why is Kurtz so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think it would be preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as is more often the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a child and then get divorced, as is more often the case in the United States. Kurtz doesn't seem to feel this way, though, as it isn't convenient to feel this way at this particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells us, having babies without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork with the proper federal agencies. What will become of the babies? Perhaps they'll all die. Or perhaps they'll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math and science, as they've been doing for quite a while.