{"id":730,"date":"2004-03-26T09:13:44","date_gmt":"2004-03-26T17:13:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2004\/03\/26\/good-pamphlet-on-marriage-equality\/"},"modified":"2004-03-26T09:13:44","modified_gmt":"2004-03-26T17:13:44","slug":"good-pamphlet-on-marriage-equality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=730","title":{"rendered":"Good Pamphlet on Marriage Equality"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Human Rights Campaign has released a good pamphlet (pdf link<\/a>) outlining the basic case for marriage equality, and answering some common objections to same-sex marriage. Here’s a sample:<\/p>\n

“Can’t same-sex couples go to a lawyer to secure all the rights they need?”<\/i><\/p>\n

Not by a long shot. When a gay or lesbian person gets seriously ill, there is no legal document that can make their partner eligible to take leave from work under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act to provide care \u2014 because that law applies only to married couples.<\/p>\n

When gay or lesbian people grow old and in need of nursing home care, there is no legal document that can give them the right to Medicaid coverage without potentially causing their partner to be forced from their home \u2014 because the federal Medicaid law only permits married spouses to keep their home without becoming ineligible for benefits.<\/p>\n

And when a gay or lesbian person dies, there is no legal document that can extend Social Security survivor benefits or the right to inherit a retirement plan without severe tax burdens that stem from being \u201cunmarried\u201d in the eyes of the law.<\/p>\n

These are only a few examples of the critical protections that are granted through more than 1,100 federal laws that protect only married couples. In the absence of the right to marry, same-sex couples can only put in place a handful of the most basic arrangements, such as naming each other in a will or a power of attorney. And even these documents remain vulnerable to challenges in court by disgruntled family members.<\/p><\/div>\n

That’s just one of many subjects the pamphlet covers – it’s worth a read.<\/p>\n

One flaw, as Gabriel Rosenberg argues, is the pamphlet’s claim of 3,136,921 same-sex couples in the US today – a number that’s simply unsupportable. From Gabriel’s post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

…this number is misleading in a number of ways. Most importantly, it represents the number of individuals “in the United States in committed [same-sex] relationships in the same residence.” That result was obtained by taking the total US adult population from the 2000 census and using an estimate of 5% of the population as gay or lesbian and an estimate of 30% of gays and lesbians living in committed relationships at the same residence. So the Urban Institute’s estimate is actually 1,568,460.5 same-sex couples. The number is also a little misleading in that the census itself estimated the number of “unmarried-partner” couples of the same sex at 601,209.<\/div>\n

As Ganriel says, the Census figure is probably an undercount, but not that <\/i>huge an undercount.<\/p>\n

Gabriel also points out that (again, according to the US Census), one in five male couples and one in three female couples are raising children – and 50% of those are raising two or more childrne. On the whole, “These numbers imply at least 330,000 children being denied the protections marriage could bring their families.”<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/b>: I just received an email from Tom Sullivan of the HRC regarding that inflated figure: “I have posted a corrected version on the website and we are looking into ways to correct the print copies (labels perhaps). All future print runs will have the correct statistics.” Cool. :-).<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Human Rights Campaign has released a good pamphlet (pdf link) outlining the basic case for marriage equality, and answering some common objections to same-sex marriage. Here’s a sample: “Can’t same-sex couples go to a lawyer to secure all the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}