Fifty years ago, the great French-born historian Jacques Barzun wrote that “whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Recently, New Orleans native Michael Lewis revealed, in his best-seller Moneyball, that Americans, including most of the people who oversee the game, don’t actually understand baseball very well. Perhaps if we understood baseball better, we could better sort through some of the most vexing problems in contemporary American life, like the question of same-sex marriage. 

The story of Moneyball is how Billy Beane made the Oakland A’s one of the most successful teams in baseball using a distinctive approach to judging talent. Tradition has blinded general managers and scouts to excellence. Baseball insiders mistakenly rate players based on how they look, rather than how they perform. They resist looking at hard data because they just “know” what is right. Beane’s recognition that the game’s shibboleths should be rethought propelled his small-market, small-budget team to the front ranks of the sport. Followers who became general managers in Toronto and Boston have begun to replicate his success. 

Now think about same-sex marriage. The Bay Area, Canada, and Massachusetts are not only outposts of new thinking about baseball; they’re outposts of new thinking about same-sex marriage as well. The two most widespread arguments against same-sex marriage rest on tradition— marriage has always meant a relationship between one man and one woman—and raising children—same-sex couples either aren’t raising children or can’t do it as well as opposite-sex couples. 

Tradition without reflection is exactly what Moneyball teaches us we should rethink. And during the spring that marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s momentous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it’s worth remembering that it was the tradition of all-white organized baseball that denied heroes like Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard and Cool Papa Bell their right to bring their talents to the major leagues. 

Today, we venerate Jackie Robinson, who shattered the traditional color line. Who remembers, let alone has a kind word for, Ben Chapman, the manager of the Phillies who tormented Robinson with bigoted shouts from the dugout?

 But even when tradition barred them from major-league teams, black Americans played a spirited, excellent brand of baseball. So, too, with gay couples. Even when denied the tangible rights, the social approval, and the reinforcement during rocky times that formal marriages provide, millions of same-sex couples have spent their lives together, forming bonds every bit as strong and valuable to themselves, their families, and their communities as those formed by their straight relatives and neighbors. 

The juxtaposition of elderly couples who have been together for 50 years lining up for marriage licenses in San Francisco with Britney Spears changing her marital status the way some people change their contact lenses should be a lesson not to judge people’s relationships by appearances. 

And what about the issue of children? Here, the Moneyball lesson about hard data versus stereotypes is worth remembering. All the evidence shows that two-parent, stable households are best for children. But that’s just as true of loving, two-parent gay or lesbian households. The most reliable long-term studies indicate that children raised by gay or lesbian parents do as well as their counterparts raised in straight households when it comes to school and employment, report similar levels of subjective well-being, and have an equal ability as adults to build their own marriages and partnerships. 

As my Stanford colleague Michael Wald, Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law, has pointed out, many gay people are highly committed parents who went to great lengths through adoption, artificial insemination, or surrogacy to have a child. Because these children were all wanted—in a nation in which all too many children are not—it is no surprise that their life prospects are good. 

If we judge by hard data, rather than the unexamined beliefs of old-timers and insiders, same-sex marriages are likely to benefit rather than harm children, as well as the adults who enter into them. 

Just as baseball is played better when we respect the diverse talents that contribute to the game and go beyond stereotypes about who can play well, so too, America is made stronger if we respect the many kinds of families that make up our nation.

(This essay first appeared in The Times-Picayune on April 1, 2004.)