Gays and the Census: Counting Them In
Economist.com
June 25th 2009

But they had hoped for more from the new president

“WE’RE getting impatient, and we’re getting concerned,” says Pamela Brown of Marriage Equality USA, a gay-rights organisation. “Rhetoric isn’t going to work.” Barack Obama was a vocal proponent of gay rights during his campaign. But they did not find their way onto the president’s agenda until this month, when nerves had already started to fray; and now he is accused of not having done enough.

On June 19th officials announced that same-sex married partners would be counted in the ten-yearly census for the first time. The 2010 census will provide the federal government’s first official recognition of gay marriage, which is legal in six states. Past censuses have not reported data on gays who consider themselves married. In the 2000 census, gay couples who ticked the box “married” were reclassified as unmarried partners. In the 1990 census, the Census Bureau changed the sex of one of the partners so they were counted as heterosexual—on the grounds the form-filler had doubtless made a mistake.

Gay activists and demographers cheered the administration’s announcement. There are some 780,000 same-sex couples in the United States, around 10% of whom are officially married or in civil partnerships, estimates Gary Gates, a demographer in the law school of the University of California, Los Angeles. But no actual federal statistics have been available on the number of gay married couples, or their race or family size.

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, says the census will “open people’s eyes” to the number of gays living in the United States and make some policy issues, such as marriage, harder for politicians to dodge. On June 17th, Mr Obama announced that he will extend some (although not full) benefits to the same-sex partners of federal employees. But some gays worry that Mr Obama has not touched bigger issues, like his campaign pledge to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bars openly gay people from serving in the armed forces, and the Defence of Marriage Act, which defines, for federal purposes, marriage as between a man and a woman. Gays, while they are happy to be counted, are beginning to worry that they cannot count on their president.