Gay Marriages Won’t Count in 2010 Says Census Bureau New England Blade by Zachary Violette July 16, 2008
Not one of the nearly 10,000 married
same-sex couples in Massachusetts will be counted as married in the 2010 Census
. Similarly, California same-sex couples who have or plan to tie the knot won’t
count either, since the Census Bureau plans to use the same counting method it
did in 2000 — before same-sex couples could legally get married in Massachusetts
— and record same-gender partners who identify as “married” as “unmarried
partners,” a category applied to both gay and straight couples.
When persons of the same gender identify as “married on the census response, the
bureau will automatically change their response to “unmarried partners” before
it releases its official statistics.
“It’s a poor scientific practice to change an accurate survey response to a
response that is inaccurate, and that’s what the Census Bureau is basically
doing,” M.V. Lee Badgett, Director of the Center for Public Policy and
Administration at University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Research director at
the Williams Institute, told the New England Blade this week. “The Census Bureau
is effectively putting married gay and lesbian couples back in the closet with
this policy. Our statistical agencies have a responsibility to count Americans
accurately so that policy-makers and scholars will be able to understand lives
and needs of all Americans.”
The change will only be made to the tabulation, which is used for statistics
released to the public and government agencies shortly after the census is
completed. But the bureau will preserve the original census response; data from
those forms is typically kept confidential for 75 years.
“The U.S. Census Bureau procedures used to count
and tabulate relationship data are guided by and comply with legal requirements
of the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 … which requires all federal agencies to
recognize only opposite-sex marriages for the purposes of administering federal
programs,” Stephen Buckner, a spokesperson for the Census Bureau, told the New
England Blade this week in a telephone interview. “Many of these programs rely
on Census Bureau statistics.”
The Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996, prohibits
the recognition of same-sex marriage for purposed of Federal benefits or
programs. Barrack Obama has called for the repeal of the Act. But even if he is
elected President of the United States in November, the Act may not get repealed
in time for the 2010 census. Nor is it clear if that Act’s repeal before 2010
would have any effect on the procedures recently announced. The bureau does not
inquire directly into respondents sexual orientation. According to published
statistics, in 2000, the bureau found that 1 in respondent in 9, of the 4.9
million household that reported being “unmarried partners” were same-sex
couples. Those couple were evenly divided between gay men and lesbians.
Janson Wu, Staff Attorney at Boston-based Gay and Lesbian Advocates and
Defenders, which, says it’s another instance of discrimination that gay couples
face.
“This is another example of how the Defense of Marriage Act and federal
discrimination is just kind of wrecking havoc in the lives of same-sex couples,”
Wu said “We have same-sex couples here in Massachusetts and now in California
and the Census Bureau is choosing to ignore that reality.”
