Archive for the ‘singlism’ Category

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.

Make taxes more fair by removing marriage factor

Many thanks to Jim (and to Bitsy, and Dennis, who both tried earlier) for getting me to finally read Lily Kahng’s paper on “eliminating marriage as a basis for preferential treatment under the tax law.” What a pleasant surprise to discover that she references AtMP’s advocacy on income taxes, as well as Jim’s extensive research and analysis (marriagePenalty.xls, best accessed here). Of course, we agree completely with Kahng’s conclusion: “The joint return is unsupportable and should be abolished.”

Quoting (with permission) Jim’s post to AtMP-Talk, our email listserv:

all my work, and all AtMP’s work for that matter, compares two unmarried people vs. a married couple, i.e. ALWAYS TWO people compared to TWO people. I believe comparing the tax burden of one person to that of two people is an apple vs. oranges comparison. But I do strongly agree with her that the plight of the uncoupled single (someone who doesn’t have someone else to collaborate with on splitting credits and deductions and even income to minimize taxes) is being left out of practically all studies and discussion of the marriage bonus/penalty issue.

For those who hate numbers and taxes, Kahng’s paper is about much more than that – she surveys attitudes to singles, all kinds of advocacy and alternatives to married groups, discrimination (other than taxes), and other sociology of singles topics. So you can skip over the tax stuff if you want and enjoy the sociology stuff.

For example, here are Kahng’s closing words:

Moving beyond the tax system, recognizing the value of singleness can help us interrogate and critique the role of government and citizens in promoting and supporting marriage. For example, the same-sex marriage debate might be informed by considerations of whether the legal, economic, and social privileges of marriage ought to be expanded further, or rather eliminated entirely. Similarly, we might further question the role of the government in promoting marriage as a solution to poverty, especially for African American women. Instead, marriage could come to be viewed as one among many alternatives. (link added)

Marital Status on the Supreme Court

There’s really nothing to say about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s marital status, or Justice Sotomayor’s, or Justice Souter’s, or anyone else’s. Marital status should not be a factor in any person’s employment application. Unfortunately, marital status discrimination in hiring is still allowed in much of the country, and, obviously, in the media.

I tried not to read any of the media flap about Kagan’s personal life. But, many AtMP members sent me links to Maureen Dowd’s column, so here it is in case you missed it. Personally, yuck! I’ve never been a Dowd fan. But I’m a big fan of Bella DePaulo, so I hope you’ll read her roundup of the media’s singlism and mothermania with regard to Kagan’s nomination.

Of much greater interest would be any serious legal analysis of whether Kagan thinks the Defense of Marriage Act is constitutional, or how she’d vote on a hypothetical challenge to an employer who provides domestic partner benefits but only to same-sex couples. Would she have decided, like Justice Alito, that spouses of persecuted refugees have greater rights than the refugees’ unmarried partners? Is she beholden to the marriage movement, like oft-mentioned potential nominee Judge Sears? Any legal scholars out there? Please?

Marital status, race and ethnicity

Really glad to see the impact of marital status discrimination addressed in Race Talk. With 70% of African-American adults unmarried (compared to 45% of Whites and 49% of Latinos in the US), every law or economic policy that uses marital status has a disparate impact on the Black community. AtMP agrees wholeheartedly that

it’s time to rethink those norms and accommodate a changing society that no longer consists of a married majority. It’s unfair to reward the life choices of some and not others when all are valid realities that should be treated as such.

India’s single women resist stigma, demand rights

A must-read article from Women’s ENews! quick highlights:

Formerly-married women in India outnumber the entire population of Canada. Ever-single women haven’t even been counted. But 58,000 women belong to single women’s organizations in 8 of India’s federated states. These organizations have lobbied for economic support, equal pay, and the right not to be burned as witches.

The article includes several organizations’ names and link – I hope our many readers in India will follow up with them!

Matrimania at Yahoo

yahoo-matrimania-questions1

What a rude surprise I got this morning! Upon signing in to manage one of AtMP’s Yahoo groups, I was instructed to create new secret questions. Yahoo helpfully suggests lots of question possibilities. But strikingly, four of their top five suggestions assume I am married!

Thanks to Bella DePaulo for coining the wonderful word “matrimania” so I know what to call this!

I was so insulted (rather amused, too) that I dropped whatever I was supposed to be doing for the Yahoo group and wrote this post instead. Then I pasted this post, plus some statistics about the number of potentially offended unmarried people in the U.S., into Yahoo’s feedback form.

I encourage you to send Yahoo feedback as well – this is a perfect opportunity for unmarried consumers to show their strength!

“What’s next, marrying your dog?”

Their lonely-hearts faces peer out of the advertisements, hangdog and looking for love. …In matrimony-mad India, where marriage is the central event of a lifetime, these posters could easily be for lovelorn, small-town bachelors, pasted up by anxious parents seeking a bride. But the suitable girl these single fellows seek is of the furry, four-footed variety. Finding one, though, is not easy. “I have been searching for months, but no luck,” said Kunal Shingla, who is looking for a mate for Foster, his 2-year-old basset hound.

This “only in August” article in today’s New York Times caught my attention for several reasons.

1 – A dear friend is preparing to move to New Delhi. As she packs she is also planning how to manage / hide / present her non-traditional relationship in this largely traditional society.

2 – Despite our U.S. focus, AtMP frequently hears from unmarried Indians seeking community.

3 – “What’s next, marrying your dog?” Real, normally intelligent, people have actually asked me this rude and thoughtless question upon hearing the mission of the Alternatives to Marriage Project.

At the moment, the best I can offer them all is a deep and compassionate sigh.

Happy senior singles

There’s good myth-busting going on at the New Old Age blog. Recent posts debunk the singlist notion that being unmarried in old age means being unhappy and alone.

From a research study mentioned in the blog:

Are Older Adults Happy? They’re about as happy as everyone else. And perhaps more importantly, the same factors that predict happiness among younger adults-good health, good friends and financial security-by and large predict happiness among older adults. However, there are a few age-related differences in life’s happiness sweepstakes. Most notably, once all other key demographic variables are held constant, being married is a predictor of happiness among younger adults but not among older adults (perhaps because a significant share of the latter group is made up of widows or widowers, many of whom presumably have “banked” some of the key marriage-related correlates of happiness, such as financial security and a strong family life). Among all older adults, happiness varies very little by age, gender or race.

I was put off by the “banked” line on first glance. But on closer reading I believe it means that young married people who describe themselves as happier than young unmarried people may be happier not because of marriage itself but because of factors that correlate with but are not caused marriage (“such as financial security and a strong family life”). Those factors can outlive marriage and can be obtained over time without marriage, so older previously married people still enjoy them as much as never married older people who had achieved similar life factors.

And from the blog itself:

loved-starved widows, if they ever really existed outside men’s imaginations, have gone the way of June Cleaver. Women like Ms. Austin see themselves as part of a new generation of widows who openly, and sometimes gleefully, admit they like being liberated from their roles as wives and homemakers. While they may grieve over the deaths of beloved spouses and while some will never recover from their losses, the vast majority of older widows, studies show, accept and even revel in their roles as single women.

Bachelors’ independence, not equality

A New York Times op-ed by John Gilbert McCurdy celebrates the Fourth of July as the

dawn of a new era when personal differences — first marital status, but later sex and race — no longer mattered in determining one’s citizenship.

Well, unmarried citizenship is not in question; but equal treatment is still far off. Has the USA really matured past the biases of its founding fathers? Compare some of McCurdy’s examples to the present:

As the delegates created a new nation, they assailed sexual immorality, luxury and sloth — all of which they associated with the single life. …

Nor was it just inside Independence Hall that bachelors were scorned. For 80 years, Pennsylvania had collected a levy on single men who earned wages but did not own property. This tax had been devised as a means of easing the burden on men with large families, but it had become increasingly onerous for the colony’s bachelors. Since the 1740s, landless singles had been paying higher taxes than 90 percent of property owners.

In our current national income tax structure, the net bonus enjoyed by married couples is about $30 Billion per year.

Celebrate your Independence Day by writing a letter to the NY Times editors to remind them that there’s more work to be done. A few years ago, AtMP posted tips and sample letters on income taxes here. Send your letter to letters@nytimes.com, and post a copy here for us to read!

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