Census Won't Count Gay Marriages The Washington Post
By Christopher Lee July 17, 2008
Diane Curtis and Ellen Leuchs tied the knot in May 2004, less than a week
after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage and a decade after beginning
their life as a couple.
To the U.S. Census Bureau, however, their marriage does not count. Or, more
specifically, it will not be counted in the 2010 census.
Although gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts and California, census
officials say that same-sex partners in both states who list themselves as
spouses will be recorded as "unmarried partners" -- just as they were in the
2000 census.
Census Bureau spokesman Stephen Buckner cited the Defense of Marriage Act,
approved by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, which
prohibits the federal government from recognizing as a marriage the union of
anyone but a man and a woman.
The law "requires all federal agencies to recognize only opposite-sex
marriages for the purposes of administering federal programs," Buckner wrote in
an e-mailed statement. "Many of these programs rely on Census Bureau
statistics."
Census officials have said the agency will retain same-sex spouses' original
responses but will edit them for the published census tabulations. The policy
was first reported by the San Jose Mercury News.
Curtis, 45, of Sunderland, Mass., said she was "disgusted."
"The effect is just to erase our marriages and our families, really," said
Curtis, a lawyer who has two children with Leuchs, 40, a fundraiser.
Critics of the policy -- and the law -- say it ignores the changing legal and
political landscape in states that contain about 14 percent of the U.S.
population. And it ensures that the census results will be factually incorrect,
they say.
"Unfortunately the stupidity and unfairness of that law gives [the census]
something of a colorable argument," said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). "It was
aimed very specifically at this. It's all the more reason to repeal it. . . .
What is it accomplishing by not having an accurate count? It's not even good
demographic policy."
The lack of data about same-sex married couples will inhibit researchers who
want to better understand a variety of issues, such as wage differences for gay
married couples and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, said Gary
Gates, a demographer at the UCLA School of Law.
"It limits our ability to get quality information," said Gates, author of the
Gay and Lesbian Atlas. "In 2000, the census could very legitimately make the
argument that with a same-sex couple, someone couldn't [legally] be a husband or
wife. And so they were making an inaccurate response accurate by changing them
to an 'unmarried partner.' The situation now is different. You are changing
potentially accurate responses to inaccurate responses."
The policy will, for example, require that the couple's children be listed as
having single parents, Gates said. And it will cause the census to undercount
families, defined as two or more people in the same household related by birth,
adoption or marriage, he said.
In Massachusetts, 10,490 same-sex couples were married between May 2004 and
August 2007, according to state figures. California, which began same-sex
marriages last month, does not keep similar figures. A ballot initiative would
amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
Peter Sprigg, vice president for policy at the nonprofit Family Research
Council, argued that the Census Bureau's policy makes sense both demographically
and legally. He said his group will "vigorously defend" the Defense of Marriage
Act if critics try to overturn it.
"We believe that marriage is intrinsically the union of a man and a woman,"
Sprigg said. "The reason marriage is a public institution in the first place is
that it brings together men and women for the reproduction of the human race and
to encourage mothers and fathers to cooperate in raising to maturity the
children produced by their union."
Curtis likened the Census Bureau's stance to something out of the Cold War
era.
"It's like we've been Photoshopped out of the picture," she said. "How long
is the federal government going to pretend we don't exist?"
Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
