Archive for March, 2011
Unmarried votes should be prized in redistricting
Yesterday the Census Bureau announced it had beaten the deadline to provide redistricting data to all 50 states. Politicians around the country will soon be looking at new district boundaries. Marital status is recognized as a very strong predictor of voting patterns, so legislators facing redistricting should be very interested in how many unmarried people they represent, and what those people think. The 2010 Census information about marital status and household composition has not yet been released (though data about race and ethnicity are available now). However, we can use other recent data to estimate where unmarried potential voters might have the biggest impact.
First, what is redistricting? In a nutshell, the population both grows and moves around, but there are only 435 seats in the House of Representative. So state officials use Census redistricting data to draw new borders for Congressional (and other legislative) districts so that each district contains roughly the same number of people. (Since every state must have at least one district, the districts do not have exactly the same number of people (calling that whole one-person-one-vote thing into question, but that’s for someone else’s blog)). Typically, party loyalists try to draw boundaries that encircle constituencies most likely to vote for their party. That often means creating districts with very strange shapes.
The four states that will gain or lose the most seats are New York (loses 2), Ohio (loses 2), Florida (gains 2), and Texas (gains 4). If you love demographics, politics and technology, check out this awesome map (click the tab called ‘apportionment’).
Second, where might unmarried constituents get the most attention? There are lots of ways to come up with estimates – here’s one:
I used the 2009 American Community Survey to look up the number of unmarried individuals and unmarried partner households in every Congressional district in NY, OH, FL and TX. The data on individuals includes all people age 15 and over – this is always a source of controversy and frustration. Obviously, most 15-18 year olds are unmarried; more importantly, they can’t vote. It would take a couple hours to extract them; I’d love to coach a volunteer on how to do that.
The following districts are in the top quartile on both measures – i.e., they have more unmarried individuals as a percentage of all individuals, and more unmarried partner households as a percentage of all households, than the remaining three-quarters of all districts in all four states. (One could use other criteria to pick key districts; I’m happy to share the data with anyone who wants to do more analysis.) Click the district name to see its current map and who represents it.
Florida 3 6.7% of households are headed by unmarried partners, 60.7% of individuals are unmarried
Florida 11 7.5% - 59.1%
Florida 23 6.5% - 60.0%
New York 12 6.7% - 57.6%
New York 16 7.0% - 68.0%
New York 21 8.2% – 53.3%
New York 28 6.6% - 60.3%
Ohio 10 7.2% - 54.3%
Texas 18 6.7% - 55.9%
Texas 25 6.7% - 53.2%
Texas 30 6.9% - 57.9%
Do you live in one of these districts? Is your Representative sensitive to the concerns of unmarried voters? How can we help you get their attention?
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advocacy, statistics
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Mar 25th, 2011 by Nicky
Is singlism a factor in military suicides?
USA TODAY reports that suicide “rates among GI’s who are single or divorced double when they go to war, [but] the rate among married soldiers does not increase…”
“One of the big things we’re interested in now is digging into this marriage thing and saying, ‘What is it you get, by being married? And how could we put it in a bottle so we can give it to everybody, whether or not they’re married?” says Ronald Kessler, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who is working on the project.
I’ve written to Dr. Kessler to suggest that many of the things married soldiers get need to be budgeted, not bottled. Pay rates, VA and survivor benefits, housing quality and other tangible features of military life have all been documented to be better for married service members.
I also suggested looking at it from the other direction: what do unmarried soldiers get that harms them, and how do we take that away. For example, do they get assigned harder jobs or longer hours or more crowded barracks? That would hardly be surprising, as we have heard many examples of such assignments in civilian life. Do unmarried soldiers get more teasing (i.e., harassment) about their relationship status, or less sympathy when their relationships end? That would also mirror workplace complaints that we frequently hear from civilians.
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health care, singlism
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Mar 24th, 2011 by Nicky
New Hampshire rejects civil unions for all
If civil unions for all seemed like a solid trend, then New Hampshire just reversed its course. According to The Telegraph, a bill (HB 569) had been proposed to “replace same-sex marriage with domestic unions for all adult partners, be they heterosexual or homosexual couples.”
Easton Republican Rep. Gregory Sorg said there is no political support for domestic unions even though Gov. John Lynch signed a civil union bill for gay couples in 2007.
Lawmakers then replaced it with same-sex marriage. Lynch became the only sitting governor to have signed a law granting marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.
“It seems to me there is no longer a constituency in the House for domestic unions. It has not been a Republican issue,” Sorg said.
“I do not believe the Democrats are in favor of reverting to civil unions and I know the Republicans aren’t,” he said.
Walpole Democratic Rep. Lucy Weber said the domestic union bill posed more complications than the civil unions law the state previously had.
“I have a very grave concern with the way this bill was written as opposed to the way civil unions was written,” Weber said.
“If we change to domestic unions for everybody, I am very unclear with how that meshes with all the federal laws and tax provisions that give us benefits because we are married.”
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get gov't out of marriage
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Mar 23rd, 2011 by Nicky
Michigan action alert: save healthcare for unmarried families!
Job-based health benefits for unmarried people are under attack all over the country.* Most recently, the Michigan State Senate resolved to take away health benefits from the unmarried families of state employees, including the staff at public universities. This would be an especially painful setback because Michigan’s rules are more inclusive than many other states’: any adult household member can be covered, even if not in a romantic relationship with the employee.
For this mean-spirited and costly decision to take effect, two-thirds of the State House has vote for it by April 18th. If you live in Michigan, please speak up now!
If you know someone who lives in Michigan, please encourage them to speak up!
*For example: in Ohio, and Arizona.
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health care
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Mar 15th, 2011 by Nicky
Perhaps they all live alone
A quip about marketing to single people caught my eye this morning, in a light-hearted article about housewares: “A visitor from another planet… might have the following impressions. These Earth people love coffee and little brightly colored, high-tech coffee makers, but perhaps they all live alone, for they seem obsessed with something called “single-serve units.””
Curious about whether the living-alone numbers had recently changed, I dug into the five-year estimates of the American Community Survey. (Statistics about un/marriage remain the 2nd most popular topic among visitors to this website. I’d love to know more about what you’re looking for and whether you find it. Please take a moment to give us valuable feedback!)
For the record, here’s how many of us really do live alone, and how the rest of us live:
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statistics
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Mar 10th, 2011 by Nicky
Could being non-monogamous be a crime?
BY: DIANA ADAMS, ESQ. and JESS GAFKOWITZ
Should the government be able to criminalize your relationship style? Could being non-monogamous be a crime? Presently a major trial in Canada asks this question with a challenge to Section 293 of Canada’s Criminal Code, which criminalizes polygamy but also any form of multiple person relationship. While the statute is considered a tool to target polygamists (with multiple spouses, and more specifically polygynists with multiple wives) it could also be used to send others to jail for nontraditional relationship styles, which could be a breach of Canadian Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Section 293 reads as follows: Polygamy
(1) Every one who
(a) practises or enters into or in any manner agrees or consents to practise or enter into(i) any form of polygamy, or
(ii) any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time,
whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage, or
(b) celebrates, assists or is a party to a rite, ceremony, contract or consent that purports to sanction a relationship mentioned in subparagraph (a)(i) or (ii),is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.Evidence in case of polygamy
(2) Where an accused is charged with an offence under this section, no averment or proof of the method by which the alleged relationship was entered into, agreed to or consented to is necessary in the indictment or on the trial of the accused, nor is it necessary on the trial to prove that the persons who are alleged to have entered into the relationship had or intended to have sexual intercourse.
When this statute was written in 1890 to limit polygamy, modern polyamorous relationships were surely beyond contemplation. Polyamory is a relationship style that allows consenting adults to have more than one romantic partner with full honesty and fully gender egalitarianism.
Polyamory is fundamentally different than polygamy and does not present the concerns that polygamy presents. It does not give special rights to men, there are no concerns about lack of consent in assigned spouses or underage spouses, nor does it teach customs inside closed communities without members seeing a realm of options. Polyamorous people are also not attempting to enter into multiple legal marriages in Canada.
However, Section 293 may inadvertently criminalize these consensual polyamorous people for being in a romantic conjugal relationship with more than one person. If three or four people choose to live together in a romantic relationship, should they face criminal penalties?
In the current Canadian case, a tiny Mormon-derived polygynous commune of 120 spouses called Bountiful represents the example of those who would be criminalized by the law. Many Canadians may be led to believe that similar small patriarchal communities of Mormon or Muslim people with multiple wives are the only ones who are affected by this law. In fact, the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association (CPAA) has become involved in the case because, (although there are no definitive statistics on the number of polygamous versus polyamorous people in Canada) there are many more polyamorous Canadians affected by the law who have not been accused of any wrongdoing and who deserve freedom to choose their relationship structure. If Section 293 is declared unconstitutional, it is likely that both polygamy and non-marital cohabitation would be legalized in Canada.
Are there any comparable American laws? Although the United States does not have a federal law like Section 293 encompassing nonlegal conjugal partnerships of more than two people, many states do criminalize bigamy and polygamy where a person already has a legal spouse.
Moreover, many Americans might be disturbed to learn that ‘unlawful cohabitation’ statutes making it illegal to live with an unmarried partner still exist in five states: Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia. Although criminal charges in these cases are rare, these unlawful cohabitation statutes are regularly used against non-married couples in child custody cases, employment, housing, and parole to incriminate non-married people because they are technically breaking the law.
As the legal challenge to Canada’s Section 293 unfolds this spring, perhaps leading to Canada’s Supreme Court, we anticipate an exciting historical moment when Canada could acknowledge that laws restricting relationship structure violate civil rights.
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international, polyamory
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Mar 8th, 2011 by Jess
Unions benefit unmarried workers, even nonunionized ones
Last year, LGBT organizations committed to doing a better job of connecting LGBT rights to other social justice issues. They’ve done a really nice job lately of connecting domestic partner benefits to collective bargaining in Ohio. I always want to see more emphasis on the fact that healthcare and workplace issues like domestic partner benefits are not just “gay” concerns, but affect much larger numbers of unmarried people.
Ohio’s unionized government employees don’t get DP benefits. But unionized workers at public universities in Ohio do. Several of those contracts cover only same-sex partners, but Kent State’s, for example, does not discriminate on the basis of gender (although partners cannot be “related by blood to a degree that would bar marriage”). Kent State is in the Akron Metro Area, where the 2009 American Community Survey estimated that 95% of the area’s over 15,000 unmarried partner households are different-sex couples. (Unmarried partner households comprise 5% of area households altogether.)
When unions negotiate workplace rights and benefits like inclusive domestic partner coverage, the impact can be felt beyond just the few union members who are in a position to use them. Employers discover that the sky doesn’t fall, and extend similar benefits to everyone. For example, Ohio recently granted nonunion state employees the right to take bereavement or sick time for issues related to a live-in partner.
This is a great example of extending what I call “care time” – the right to take time off work to care for the health of loved ones (and oneself) without being fired or losing pay. Care time is a big area of marital status discrimination in healthcare and at the workplace. Expanding care time is an affordable and humane way to achieve more fairness for all unmarried people.
Learn more about care time problems and solutions from our friends at the National Partnership.
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health care
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Mar 1st, 2011 by Nicky
