Suicides and "The Policy"

For those of you who aren't aware, the LDS church instituted a policy regarding LGBT families back in November. One of the major criticisms of this policy is it could potentially increase the suicide rate of LGBT Mormons. And recently, some numbers have been thrown around about the number of LGBT Mormon suicides since the policy was instituted.  I haven't fact-checked these, but as of January 23, the numbers I've seen were around 32.

I don't understand the policy, and I don't particularly want to defend it, but I do believe in statistics. The number of suicides alone is not enough to say that the policy has caused any change in suicidal behavior. We need to compare to the number of LGBT Mormons who would have done the same if there were no new policy announced.

We can't actually know what would have happened, but we can estimate it.  Ideally, we'd have data on LDS LGBT suicides rates, but I couldn't find anything quantitative.  So let's assume that most of these cases are Americans, and the average suicide rate in the US is 0.0211% per year, or 0.00451% of the population in the same 78 day period. The church reports around 6,466,267 members in the United States. This means that, if Mormons are typical in their suicide rate (which they seem not to be), there should be around 285 Mormon suicides in that same time period. Around 3.4% of the adult population identify as LGBT, so that takes the estimate down to about 10 suicides.

All these numbers come from Wikipedia, so I'm using questionable sources, but I didn't want to put too much time into this. But with this very loose estimate of suicide rate, it seems there would be a tragic increase—a 220% increase.  That seems a little too large to be believable to me.

We could mirror stats on Jewish LGBT youth to help account for the fact that LGBT folks in religious communities are more likely to attempt suicide.  Along these lines, if we assume there are 219,853 LGBT Mormons and that they are four times more likely to commit suicide than national average, that would put our estimate closer to 40 suicides in the same time range—this would mean that there was actually a decrease in the suicide rate since the policy was enacted.  This may not be as surprising as it sounds, since there was significant backlash against the policy, so LGBT Mormons may have actually received a surge of support from friends and family.

The point I'm trying to make is that it is very, very difficult to make any causal attributions in this case (or in general).  Suicide is incredibly sad regardless of cause, and I also mourn that any person could feel rejected by their religion.  We must take steps to help prevent suicide, and we must be loving and welcoming members of our respective communities.  But part of knowing what steps to take is to get real data on what's happening, not just jumping to the worst conclusions.  Big changes require strong evidence.  And probably lots of hugs in the meanwhile.

morality in a governed society, emotional premises, and same-sex marriage

Government inherently imposes morality on its society.  Laws define what is morally acceptable and unacceptable, and the enforcement of those laws in turn constrains society to the particular aspects of morality manifest in said laws.

A democratic society should theoretically have laws that represent the morality of its population.  Things get a little trickier with representative democracies like the United States.  While the United States has a complicated and nuanced system of government, I think we all agree that its laws should be supported by a large portion, if not the majority of its population.

So, for the sake of simplicity, let's presume that this idea (that a democratic society should have laws that represent the morality of its population) holds for all democracies, direct or representative.  The people vote for laws and policies, or elect individuals to govern, such that the resulting government matches their own values as closely as possible.

To recap: anything relating to the governance of a society is a moral issue.  This includes the definition of rights.  The problem with moral issues is there is no right answer, except through consensus--that's just the way we work.  A philosophy is only as good as its strength in obtaining adherents.

You see, moral issues, while the can be argued logically, are predicated on some premises, which, when you get to the core of things, have an emotional basis.   A good debater can construct an argument to prove anything given the right set of premises.  That same debater can also dismantle any argument if allowed to disregard or redefine the premises.

So what does this all mean?  Let's consider an example: the laws and rights pertaining to marriage, which seems to be such a popular topic these days.  Some people have the emotional premise that marriage should only exists between and man and a woman.  Other people have different emotional premises that lead to the conclusions that marriage should be able to occur between any two willing adults.  There are also folks who think marriage shouldn't exist as a government construct, based on the premise that government should be minimal.  There are many more variations in opinion and other complicated aspects like rights outside of marriage, but I'll leave itemizing all the permutations and complexities to you.

How do we decide what to do as a society in the US? We vote, courts make decisions, laws are passed.  In the case of courts, judges have a set of legal premises in addition to their own options. Again, it's a complicated system, and in the case of same-sex marriage, there are strong opinions in either side.

I believe that same-sex marriage will be legalized eventually, since the primary purpose of modern marriage is individual fulfillment.  (There are more personal premises and opinions related to whether or not that should be the case.) The question is whether it will happen at the state level or the federal level.  In general, I'm more in favor of state level laws, but there are tricky questions regarding recognizing marriage from other states.

What I really wanted to drive home is that when people make arguments that seem totally illogical to you, it's probably because they have a different set of emotional premises.  (Though it's entirely possible that they have faulty logic.)  I've read many articles about how there are no good arguments against gay marriage.  Of course there aren't if you don't share your opponents' premises!  Opposing same-sex marriage is hard in particular because there is no argument: the opinion is the premise.  Proponents, on the other hand, can dig for deeper premises relating to equality, and thus make more compelling arguments.