July 7, 2009
Counting Same-Sex Marrieds in 2010 Census (And Why Republicans Are Stonewalling Confirmation of the Bureau Appointee)
Leonard Link ponders the logistics of accurately counting married same-sex couples in the United States — and why Republicans don’t want an accurate count. Worth the full read:
Same-Sex Marriage and the
2010 United States Census… The picture in the U.S. is complex. As of now, same-sex couples can marry in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa, with new laws extending the right to marry to go into effect in the coming months in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. But the Maine law may not go into effect if sufficient signatures are submitted to the state government to force a “people’s veto” on the ballot. The NY State Assembly has passed a marriage bill that is pending before the State Senate. The NJ Legislature may be poised to enact a marriage bill after the November election. It is possible that pending litigation will revive the right to marry in California, but certainly not in time for the 2010 Census; on the other hand, there are about 18,000 couples who married in California prior to the passage of Proposition 8 and whose marriages have been validated by the California Supreme Court, and there is still an open question about the marital status of California residents who married in other jurisdictions prior to the passage of Proposition 8. I said this was complex….
[An article in USA Today] also points out the phenomenon of inaccurate self-reporting. Many same-sex couples who have gone through commitment ceremonies, or holy union ceremonies through their religious denominations, will consider themselves “married” and may check that box, even though they have not taken the step of legal marriage. There are now enough jurisdictions offering same-sex marriage without a residency requirement that anybody who wishes to marry and has the resources to travel can do so, but that’s a substantial trip in many parts of the country. If what the Census hopes to do is generate reasonably accurate data on legal same-sex marriages, that may prove a hopeless task without some method of cross-validating the answers against state marriage registries. I’m not aware that they make any attempt to do cross-validating on different-sex marriages, and I bet there are plenty of inaccuracies there as well. (I was told the story of a major non-profit agency that adopted domestic partnership benefits for same-sex partners and decided, as a matter of equity, that they couldn’t require documentation of a partnership without requiring documentation from different-sex partners that they were actually married. The result was to discover a significant proportion of their employees receiving spousal benefits who were not legally married…. so I suspect that Census data on marriage is already inflated by heterosexuals who self-report as married but have not taken the legal steps.)
The Census Bureau people have many issues to ponder… which makes it even more ridiculous that Republicans in the Senate have been holding up confirmation of President Obama’s highly-qualified appointee to head the agency, Professor Robert M. Groves, because of their articulated fears that he is an advocate of “sampling” in order to correct for undercounts of hard-to-count populations. While the Republicans fight about a policy that they fear will lead to a more accurate (or, in their view, possibly inflated) count of transient and minority voters, who are more likely to vote Democratic than Republican, the Census Bureau remains without its designated leadership as the days tick away and the actual enumeration required by the Constitution looms. …
More at the link.
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Filed Under: Civil Rights, Marriage, Republicans, United States
