But wouldn’t that info be helpful and interesting?  Having two of the same gendered people shouldn’t just invalidate the “married” selection.  Seems to me that people might like to search the database using those variables.

This is classic Bush Administration nonsense.  Fake the info to fit the policy.  Heaven forbid real data intrude on their wishful thinking.

Stupid burns.  Barack should be President by then, so maybe he’ll have time to fix it.

This is so utterly disgusting and disingenous—they don’t ask for the marriage certificates of heterosexual couples—if you say you are married you are counted as married. If you say those are your kids, they count as your kids. The idea that the state steps in and redefines the defintion of some people’s marriages is just absurd—every religious community in the country should be up in arms about this. What is to stop the state from refusing to count marriages that took place in a church? Or the marriages of divorced people? Nothing. The law should be the same for everyone—either self reporting is good enough, or documentary proof from everyone.  It would be hellaciously complex and expensive to demand legal proof from every heterosexual couple—and we might find out that lots of people are cohabiting without being married too. Can’t have that! Must preserve deniability for actuallyr ecognizing what people are doing.

aimai

Now that’s just stupid.  They’re going to decide that legally married people aren’t really married because the unconstitutional DOMA hasn’t been tested in court yet?

This kind of crap always makes me want to force them to write “Full Faith and Credit” a thousand times until it frickin’ sinks in.

We’re only talking two states with legal same-sex marriage now.

With California, Massachusetts and New York recognizing same-sex marriage, we’re talking about 20% of the population of the United States.

What category will civil unions fall into?  It is not exactly unmarried partner, but not married partner either.  Civil unions are not banned by DOMA. 

Do VT civil union same sex partners get called unmarried with nothing more specific as well?  What about hetrosexual civil unions?  As civil union is legal per DOMA, and should therefore form a legal family unit at the federal level, wouldn’t changing that to unmarried partner be even more dirrectly wrong data-wise?  (Ethically, the whole thing stinks.)

California has a over 10% of the nation’s population, last I heard.

It probably also skews gay a bit more than some other states, as we have communities that are welcoming to them (and ones that aren’t, but if you’re moving to California for a better life, you’re aiming for the coast, not Fresno).

We’d make a big impact on the census.

Plus, outside the states where it is legal, I think couples who have made their vows in places it is legal should be counted as married.

Considering the problems that have been cropping up with the 2010 Census (See http://www.gao.gov/highlights/d08550thigh2_1.pdf
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021503196.html
among others - apologies for the non-embedded links) this might be another case where incompetence is playing as big a role as malfeasance.

Incompetence and malfeasance: The one-two punch of the Bush Administration.

Add another category already, and let who will lump however they wish.
“Married, by Federal standards (heterosexual)”, “Married, by State standards (same-sex)”, “unmarried partner”, “civil union” (the last two to be disaggregatable by gender composition).

Drs. Gary Gates and Lee Badgett, the demography and economics experts at the LGBT rights think tank, The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School, must be having a fit!

This lets some wingnut claim that according to the census, no gay people have actually taken advantage of the legality of same-sex marriage. When the census results come out, just wait for this one.

Actually, Washington (not DC) has civil unions available for elderly straight persons (at least one partner has to over 65 I think).

I do have some insider knowledge from the standpoint of working business development for a subcontractor on one of the losing contractor teams.  The data fields to carryover from the 2000 Census to the 2010 Census have been in place since the software development requirements were finalized in 2006. The 2008 Census Dress Rehearsal is already over, so they probably have enough on their hands resolving the problems that uncovered to be able to add new data fields at this point.

That being said, if the political will to make changes were there from the Bureau, the contractor would find a way to do it.

There are corrupt governments, and then there are *corrupt* governments.

Corrupting the FBI the way FDR did is one thing.  Even corrupting the IRS the way Nixon did is not too surprising.

Bush has corrupted the GAO and the Census Bureau.  Now *that* is corruption on a truly epic scale.

Not to be a concern troll, but you might want to be careful what you wish for here. If only a small fraction of gays self-reports (or gets counted) as married, gay-marriage opponents will be able to bleat, “See? Those evul gays never wanted stable relationships in the first place!”

BTW, Dr. Psycho, how did FDR “corrupt” the FBI? I thought Hoover accomplished that pretty much all on his own.

Political maneuvering, bureaucratic f%^kups, and intended/unintended redundant work.  *Sigh*  Some things just never change. 

Dweeze: I do have some insider knowledge from the standpoint of working business development for a subcontractor on one of the losing contractor teams.  The data fields to carryover from the 2000 Census to the 2010 Census have been in place since the software development requirements were finalized in 2006.

No new fields are required, Dweeze. (Of course, if the US Census cared about being accurate, they would have introduced new data fields to cover the new legal relationships of domestic partnership, civil union, etc.)

But as of 2004 - indeed, before that if the US recognises Canadian marriages as legal - same-sex couples have been married. Marriage is a field already recognised by the US Census, is it not? The decision is not to permit a person legally married to a person of the same gender to tick the “married” box, not to add a new category for “married couples of the same-sex”.

That’s pretty disingenuous on the part of the Census Bureau.  Did they not count interracial marriage where it was legal before Loving v. Virginia?

As for me, I just donated part of my economic stimulus to Mass Equality, to ensure that equal marriage rights are protected here in the Bay State.

The other thing, of course, is that politicizing the census in such a clear way reduces public confidence in all of its results, because we have to start wondering which other data might be being messed with in a more secret way. And that in turn makes people less willing to cooperate with the census, which makes all of the results less useful.

...because we have to start wondering which other data might be being messed with in a more secret way.

Next news item will be that anyone who marks any religion other than “Christian” or “Republican” is automatically changed to that. (Jews and Muslims get dumped into “Christian”, atheists and pagans get dumped into “Republican”, I’ll bet.)

That will then be used to “prove” that America is a Christian nation and Obama was wrong all along.

MaJeff, god of biscuits,

My point was that the census asks you to *self report* whether you are married or not. I don’t think there is any verification process to determine whether you are, in fact, legally married to the person you say you are.  In fact I very much doubt it. Nor is there any process by which they figure out that you are married if you say you aren’t.  The census is based upon more or less truthful self reporting.

aimai

What would happen if a straight couple tried to get a civil union in, say, Connecticut?

And this isn’t even the worst of it!  In 1990, when same-sex partners identified as married, the Census Bureau was confused (“Marriage is between a man and a woman!”) and recoded the *gender* on one of the partners, reclassifying the couple as a different-sex married couple!  In 2000, they did a bit better and reclassifed same-sex spouses as same-sex unmarried partners.  But, yes, we can and should do better still.  Since when is more complete information a bad thing? 

Oh—and as half of a different-sex couple who never plans to marry, I resent being excluded from the definition of family, too!

Why in the world can’t they just let people answer truthfully, and then mix, match and combine the resulting data how they need to for whatever report they want?

I’m sure they do that with things like ethnicity, where you can put all sorts of things, but then group (if you need to) into things like “white” and “non-white” if you want to compare such things?

Why fudge the underlying data? Especially since, while it sucks, people in domestic partnerships are “unmarried” even in the state level sense.

But a same-sex couple married anywhere is still married and should be able to self-report as such, and then for federal purposes, they can only choose to call opposite sex couples married. Fudging the data permanently closes the door to the truth.

There is no science here, just politics.

Since the information will not be accurately recorded, gay couples who are legally married should engage in civil disobedience and refuse to take part in the census.