Unmarried Blog

Free webinar about joining AtMP’s Board of Directors

That you’re reading this blog suggests you care about fairness for unmarried people. Maybe you’ve flirted with the idea of getting more involved. Today is the day to get serious: Become a candidate for our volunteer board of directors!

Leadership Webinar Dates:

Friday Aug 20, noon ET
Wednesday Aug 25, 9 pm ET

We’re seeking strategic thinkers, fearless fundraisers, wise advisors, savvy spokespersons and people who have experience with nonprofit boards. If you’d like to be a candidate, or just want to learn more, please join a free Leadership Webinar!

In an hour or less, the Leadership Webinar will cover the legal responsibilities of all boards as well as details about AtMP’s board and its work, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions. To participate, all youl need is a phone. You can follow the visuals onilne or print them out in advance.

We’re offering the same webinar at two different times to accommodate potential candidates from around the nation. Please click on a preferred date to register: Friday Aug 20, noon ET, or Wednesday Aug 25, 9 pm ET.

If neither date works for you, please contact us and we’ll arrange another way for you to get the information and ask questions.

In case you’ like to read about AtMP and its board in advance, here are some links to important background information on the web:
mission statement | public policy priorities | annual reports | about the board

Neighbors, New Yorkers

The New York Times New Old Age blog offered another revealing story about unmarried caring relationships, and how important they are to our health. In brief, a not-young married couple provides food, company and transportation to their older neighbors. They are more important and reliable to their neighbors’ daily well-being than are their neighbors’ blood relatives.

Reading the comments on this story, I was fascinated by how many people said the neighbor deserves not only thanks and chocolate but also money to cover expenses (I agree). I was also glad one reader pointed out “… that the person who is so selfless may start demanding a decision-making role in determining how, when, where or what health care is given ….” The reader saw this as a negative “danger,” which of course it could be. But it also could be a positive, desirable situation to have a knowledgeable neighbor caregiver who takes part in health care decision making. The challenge is to permit the positive and prevent the negative.

Judging from the original post and the comments, people are comfortable with the idea that the neighbor caregiver has “already driven ailing neighbors to the emergency room several times.” People should not then be comfortable with the idea that hospital staff could stop the neighbor at the door and prevent her from visiting the elderly patient whom she delivered. This is the kind of situation that AtMP’s comment on the proposed federal visitation rule tries to address. There’s still time to submit your comment – please do!

So far a New York college radio station seems to be the only media outlet covering the visitation rule. WFUV plans to air a piece about it early Monday morning. We did a 10-minute interview with them today, but of course the coverage might last just a few seconds. Listen in if you can!

Dangers of marriage as policy ideal

AtMP has seen important progress on unmarried people’s rights since its founding in 1998. But now I worry that the trend might be starting to slip into reverse. Two recent court decisions – both hailed as gay rights victories – actually highlight the dangers of using marriage as an exclusive public policy ideal, instead of valuing all individuals, caring relationships and families.

While celebrating that California’s Prop 8 was overturned and same-sex couples may regain the right to marry there, our friends Rachel and Bella DePaulo point out that the judge and the winning lawyers elevated marriage and disparaged alternatives to marriage, to an extraordinary and unnecessary extent.

With far less fanfare, Arizona ruled that same-sex domestic partners of state employees could have their health benefits back, after taking them away last year. However, local news reports that

The ruling does not affect unmarried heterosexual couples who also gained coverage as part of a change in state policy pushed through by the administration of former Gov. Janet Napolitano. Absent some change in policy — or a different lawsuit — they will lose their domestic partner benefits at the end of this year. Attorney Dan Barr said the lawsuit did not cover these “straight’’ unmarried workers because they are in a different legal situation: Unlike gays, they can get married to obtain benefits.

In essence, both court cases say “if you can get married, you should, and the burden’s on you if you don’t.” We see parallels in the private sector: both Google and Syracuse University are reimbursing income taxes their employees pay on health benefits for same-sex but not different-sex partners.

Today I had a very pleasant and helpful conversation with an attorney at Lambda Legal. I learned that lawyers have a hard time making an equal protection claim for different-sex couples. To paraphrase, at least two courts have ruled that ‘choosing not to drive a Cadillac does not give someone the right to drive a Pinto.’

I’m not a lawyer, but my instinct says that a winning case would have to demonstrate that being domestic partners or staying single are better options than marriage for a significant group of people. We’d have to prove that marriage is the Pinto, not the Cadillac. Obviously, many AtMP members believe this is true for themselves. Can we build a legal argument to that effect? Can we build one that overcomes the lens of traditionalism through which judges and business leaders see the world?

Visitation victory within reach!

Back in April, President Obama introduced a hospital visitation memo, to ensure visitation rights for all patients. While the proposed rule is a great attempt, it still needs improvement in four key ways:

It should insure visitation protection

1) for legally appointed health care agents,

2) without discrimination on the basis of marital/relationship status,

3) for emergency patients, and

4) for patients who have not designated visitors and/or completed advanced directives.

We spent considerable time working on our public comment, incorporating some of AtMP’s members’ traumatic hospital visitation stories. It is now available to read and provide inspiration – we urge YOU to tell the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) your story! The deadline to submit a comment is August 27 – don’t wait, show your support now!

Matrimania makes some deaths count more, some survivors count less

In 2006, New York City was rocked by the terrible death of Sean Bell. Unfortunately, the shooting of Sean Bell was not a rare or unique event. Some quick exploration finds that NYC police fatally shot an average of 24 people per year from 1990 through 2000, that, “in 77% of the incidents where officers fired their weapons at civilians between 1999 and 2006, the officers were the only ones shooting, with officers often shooting at unarmed civilians,” and that “during 1996 and 1997, 90.5% of civilian shooting targets were black and Latino.” Horribly, the death of unarmed black and Latino men in a hail of police bullets in NYC happens much too often, yet rarely becomes a huge news story.

One thing that made Sean Bell’s death huge news was the fact that it occurred on the eve of his wedding. The planned wedding separated Mr. Bell from potential stereotypes, giving the media a guaranteed attention-getter. Mr. Bell’s death is far from the only one to be treated differently because of proximity to a wedding. Just this morning I heard a radio report about a terrible plane crash in Pakistan: all 152 people aboard were killed; the only ones described in any detail were two Americans and a Pakistani couple who had just celebrated their wedding.

This is not to question that each of these deaths is tragic, but to point out that the media often relies on matrimania to make some violent, untimely deaths seem more terrible than others.

The loss of Sean Bell is in our minds again today, because NYC is paying his family $7 million to settle their lawsuit for “wrongful death, negligence, assault and civil rights violations.” Technically speaking, none of the settlement will go to Nicole Bell, whom Mr. Bell was about to marry after a long-term unmarried partnership during which they bore and co-raised two children. “The money will go to her two children with Mr. Bell, Jada, 7, and Jordyn, 4; she will not receive a share because she was not married to Mr. Bell (she took his name legally after his death).”

Since Ms. Bell was involved in negotiating the settlement, I’m willing to assume that she’s OK with the way it works. But what if they hadn’t had children? What if they had been planning to adopt? What if they were all much older and the children were independent adults? What happens to unmarried survivors whose partners die wrongful deaths?

Professor Nancy Polikoff has documented that few states allow any compensation to unmarried survivors, and New York State has consistently denied them – see her book Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage, page 88-89. Matrimania is not just an annoying media habit. Reliance on marital status in wrongful death cases, as in so many other legal and economic policies, can double the pain of a loss and create permanent hardships for people whose caring, interdependent relationships don’t count.

Introducing a blogroll

Well it’s about time! The Unmarried Blog has finally started a blogroll (at right). The handful of blogs listed today are those that I have personally followed for quite a while. Please suggest others via comments.

You’ll also notice a list of editors. We’ll soon be introducing several new editors who have joined our team in order to bring you more and better posts about alternatives to marriage. And, we’ll soon post guidelines for writing guest posts.

How big are we?

Today the Census Bureau sent a bunch of statistics to the media to help reporters write attention-getting articles about National Unmarried and Single Americans Week – the third full week of September (Sept. 19-25 in 2010).

To borrow a line from our friend Tom Coleman: much of the data in this press release is based on the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of only 50,000 households conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Because this sample is so small, it is subject to much greater error than the American Community Survey. Until all the data has been gathered and processed from the 2010 Census, we’ll keep using the 2006 – 2008 American Community Survey three-year estimates as our best source of information. The ACS uses a much bigger sample size, and combining three years of data makes it even bigger and more reliable.

For example, the 2008 3-year ACS estimates that less than half – 49.566% – of all households in the U.S. are occupied by married couples (with or without children or other people).

I haven’t yet found an ACS data-point for marital status of householder, though it is possible to work backwards into it. The CPS does report the marital status of householders, finding 3,348,000 married individuals who maintain households without their spouses. Some might be separated, or long-distance commuters, or married to someone who is in the military or incarcerated or just plain missing.

We think about these numbers a lot, because it means a lot to people to be “in the majority.” Somehow, there’s validation in numbers: people instinctively conflate “majority” and “average” with “normal” and “okay.” Of course, AtMP is here to say that unmarried people are perfectly normal and okay no matter how the stats tick up or down over the years. And of course, we celebrate the solidly consistent trends showing the unmarried community’s growth and diversity.

Behind the numbers of single black women

If you like charts and percentages, you’ll love this collection of figures comparing marriage rates by race & gender with a focus on people with high incomes / educations.

DP benefits are issues of health & justice, not orientation (updated)

Thanks to Jonathan for sending me the great news that Google will cover the extra tax costs for employees with same-sex partners whose domestic partner benefits coverage is treated as taxable income (unlike spousal benefits). It is infuriating that Google would level the playing field only for same-sex partners, leaving different-sex partners to pay more or “just get married.” This is one of my biggest pet peeves, and here is (a corrected version of) what I posted as a comment on the New York Times blog about the story.

As reported by HRC, Google extends benefits to the domestic partners of both same- and different-sex employees (as do 95% of companies that offer DP benefits).

According the US Census Bureau, there are three times as many different-sex unmarried partner households in the San Francisco – Oakland – Fremont Metro Area workforce than same-sex ones. Nationwide, different-sex partners comprise 88.6% of the 6.15 million households headed by cohabiting couples. In a 2006 study, Badgett of the Williams Institute (who is quoted in the main article) wrote that “people with different-sex partners who have domestic partner coverage [currently] outnumber the same-sex partners with domestic partner coverage by a nine to one margin” and that, if all US employers offered DP benefits, “out of every thousand employees, on average only one to four would sign up a same-sex partner, and another 13–21 would sign up a different-sex partner.”

This is not a “gay” issue, it is a public health and social justice issue. Again quoting Badgett, “Gay men and lesbians in couples are more likely to be uninsured than are married heterosexuals, and people with unmarried different-sex partners are the least likely to be insured.” In addition, different-sex partners are also more likely to be people of color, and to have lower incomes, than married or same-sex couples. (More on unmarried people’s access to health care.)

What a company as rich as Google should do is convert its entire family benefits structure to a plus-one model, in which every employee has an equal right to extend benefits to her/his economic dependents, children up to age 26 (per new federal law) plus one non-dependent adult regardless of relationship type.

Google’s new subsidy policy is a ridiculously wrong-headed move that will surely antagonize it’s workforce and should hurt its global reputation.

Healthcare.gov ignores unmarried partners

As an early step in implementing health care reform, the federal government has launched a new website intended to help you “Take health care into your own hands.” Unless you’re in an unmarried partnership, that is.

A search for “domestic partner” on the website returns ZERO information (a search for “spouse” returns 43 links). You can be a “family with children” or an “individual,” but you’ll have a hard time finding information for child-free couples and nothing for unmarried couples.

Rather than get mad, let’s take the feds at their word and help them improve. Many pages have a feedback box in the lower right corner that asks “Was this page helpful?” Click NO, and add a short note such as “I want information about domestic partner coverage.”

We’ll keep an eye on healthcare.gov to see whether they really improve.

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