About the Author:  Andrew is the CTO of FortiusOne and is focused on building an open, easy to use and powerful analytics and visualization platform. You can read more on his personal blog at HighEarthOrbit or follow him on twitter @ajturner. Read more from this author

With the recent passing of Prop 8 in California, I was inspired to do some research into gay marriage laws in the US as well as divorce statistics for straight couples. Originally I had intended to put together an opinionated piece about gay marriage laws and divorce rates, but in my search I was thwarted by a lack of solid information and references. It is exactly this “lack of” information that I find interesting. Why don’t some states report divorce numbers? Why is it so hard to find good religious statistics? Also, is there any readily available data on the rate of divorce for gay couples? Is the process of collecting the data too difficult or is there just not enough interest? Based on what I did find, here are some simple observations.

The United States has one of the highest divorce rates in the world and is also a nation polarized on the issue of gay marriage.

I thought it might be interesting to look at gay marriage laws on a state by state basis, and used the LA Times online as a great resource. Last week they published a fantastic timeline on gay marriage laws by state from January of 2000 to May of 2009. The timeline uses ten different categories of laws from least rights to most rights for gay marriage and animates how a state (and the nation) has changed over time. I took data from the first and last dates on the map, and mapped a difference for each state’s laws on gay marriage using Maker! What I found was that middle America has become less and less gay-friendly and the coastal states have tended to become more gay-friendly. States with negative numbers have become more strict on gay marriage, while those with positive have become more for gay marriage. Those states with zero values have remained the same for those two dates, but that can mean either for or against gay marriage. When you view the map in Geocommons (link published below) click on individual states for their past and current laws and to see whether or not they have changed at all.

The next thing I thought might be interesting was a state by state straight divorce rate map. Unfortunately, this kind of data is very difficult to find in one place. And many states such as California, Minnesota, Indiana, Louisiana, Georgia and Hawaii have stopped reporting their straight divorce statistics. I’m not sure why this is, but it made mapping divorce rates very difficult. I did find some information at the United Nations Statistics Division page and I’ve simply presented each state’s raw number of straight divorces for the year 2007 excluding the states mentioned above. Again, follow the link to the map below to see exact numbers for the states included.

All of these points have inspired me to dig deeper into these issues. If you have good data about any of these topics and would like to create your own maps, please post a comment with your thoughts and use Finder! and Maker! to see if you can find any correlations between gay marriage, divorce, religion, or whatever you think might be interesting. Leaving aside my thoughts on gay marriage and divorce, I think it is safe to say that divorce is a problem in our country and as a nation we are very polarized on the issue of gay marriage. What are your thoughts?

Here are the links to view these data layers:

http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/13181

http://finder.geocommons.com/overlays/13182

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/5750

http://maker.geocommons.com/maps/5751

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