Topic: Expert available to offer commentary on Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage cases, with a focus on social & economic implications
Expert: M.V. Lee Badgett, expert on same-sex marriage policy issues and professor of economics and director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; key witness during 2010 Prop 8 trial Perry v. Schwarzenegger http://www.masspolicy.org/people_faculty_badgett.html
Available: Via phone, email, or via satellite for TV segments from on-campus studio in Amherst, Mass.
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Same-sex marriage expert M.V. Lee Badgett, professor of economics and director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is available to discuss the potential social and economic implications of this week’s Supreme Court hearings involving challenges to California’s 2008 Proposition 8 results and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The Court will be hearing the cases Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively.
A key witness during California’s original Prop 8 trial (Perry v. Schwarzenegger) in 2010, Badgett can comment on:
• The economic harm Prop 8 has caused same-sex couples denied the right to marry• The damage Prop 8 has caused California’s overall economy, and how same-sex marriage legalization has benefitted the economies of states such as Massachusetts, New York, and Iowa, as well as D.C.• Why the harm caused by DOMA is much more practical than symbolic• Her thoughts on the oral arguments before the Court during Hollingsworth v. Perry (Prop 8) and U.S. v. Windsor (DOMA)
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ABOUT M.V. LEE BADGETT
M.V. Lee Badgett is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also serves as research director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA’s School of Law. Her most recent book, When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage, addresses the core issues in marriage debates in European countries and the U.S. She drew on that work in her testimony in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger trial challenging Prop 8. She recently directed a successful four-year project funded by the Ford Foundation to encourage more and better data collection on sexual orientation. Her other publications include Money, Myths, and Change: The Economic Lives of Lesbians and Gay Men and the co-edited Sexual Orientation Discrimination: An International Perspective.
ContactJared SharpeNews and Media RelationsUniversity of Massachusetts AmherstPhone: 413-545-3809Email: jsharpe[at]admin.umass.eduwww.umass.edu/newsoffice
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