Be Careful What You Wish For...

The Ettelbrick Project for LGBTQ Family Recognition (named for Paula Ettelbrick), a part of the Stonewall Community Foundation, is sponsoring a program in San Francisco next Wednesday, August 8, entitled, "Be Careful What You Wish For: Making Marriage Victories for Same-Sex Couples a Win-Win for All Families."  The program is fully described here, with logistical information as well.

The program will focus in part on the loss of domestic partner benefits once same-sex couples win the right to marry, and the reasons to oppose such results.  I wrote recently about this phenomenon in Weschester County, New York.

We are seriously in danger of losing protections for a range of families.  In other words, we face the prospect of making marriage mandatory.  In the words of the description of the program, "you get married or you get nothing."

I urge everyone in the San Francisco area to attend.  A similar program was held in New York in June.  For more information about the project, contact its director, Terry Boggis, at terry.boggis@stonewallfoundation.org

Film chronicles the birth of a group just for children with gay parents

COLAGE, the organization for "people with a lesbian gay bisexual transgender or queer parent," now has a staff of eight. But the film Family Time, which you can watch on the COLAGE website, chronicles the history of the group and shows that its founders did not even know eight people with an LGBTQ parent when they were growing up.

The film shows how the fight for marriage equality made children with gay parents more visible than ever. Happily, from my point of view, the group values all family forms, and its 2004 newsletter focusing on marriage contains many voices on the subject.

The group also has a larger social justice mission. Yesterday its website posted "5 Reasons We Stand For Workers' Rights." Awesome.

Watch the film and marvel.

The NY Times should not be the last word on marriage and health

As soon as I saw the New York Times article on marriage and health I knew exactly where to turn next -- the blog of Bella DePaulo, a psychologist whose work most convincingly debunks the so-called health advantages of marriage. I was not disappointed; she had responded to the piece when it first appeared on line last week. Her response also refers back to her previous well-documented posts challenging the claims of researchers whose work forms the backbone of the organizations and individuals (including President Obama) who claim more marriage will mean fewer social problems.

Earlier this year, DePaulo wrote an essay for Huffington Post explaining why Harvard University Press was right to decline to publish Maggie Gallagher and Linda Waite's book, The Case for Marriage, which is virtually the Bible of the "marriage promotion" movement. Tara Parker-Pope, author of the NY Times article (and a forthcoming book on marriage) should have read DePaulo's critique before relying uncritically on Waite's conclusions.

The NY Times piece does have nuance, but it would have benefitted from attention to the work of scholars and researchers associated with the Council on Contemporary Families, which held its 2010 conference this weekend. Among the "unconventional wisdom" on their website is a longitudinal study of 2000 adults by Cornell professor Kelly Musick comparing the happiness level of individuals who remained single, got married, or began living with a partner without getting married. And if we're just looking at physical health, there's some intriguing research from Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, a Stanford doctoral candidate, that African-American women are more likely to become obese if they are married than if they are never married and don't live with a partner; and marriage is associated with a modest increase in Body Mass Index for African-American, Hispanic, and white men and women.

A recently published anthology of essays by CCF scholars, Families As They Really Are, is also a welcome antidote to the oversimplistic and often misleading claims about the one-size-fits-all marriage model.

Congratulations to Kenyon Farrow

Queers for Economic Justice has named Kenyon Farrow its new Executive Director. I met Kenyon when we were both part of the group that wrote the "Beyond Marriage" statement. Kenyon is a visionary. QEJ is the only LGBT organization with a mission dedicated solely to the well-being of those who are economically disadvantaged.

I'll be making my annual contribution to QEJ in Kenyon's honor. I invite others to do the same.

New from the Alternatives to Marriage Project

It's always a good day to check out what's happening with the Alternatives to Marriage Project. They recently expanded their on-line resources with more facts, experts, reports, etc to counter the dominance of the "marriage movement" position that the decline of life long heterosexual marriage is responsible for all our social problems. They are also in the forefront of a growing movement to stop using federal anti-poverty funds on "marriage promotion."

Check them out.

SEIU resolution values all families

Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been reading my book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law

Here is the full text of Resolution # 109 Adopted at the 2008 SEIU Convention

Valuing All Families

Members of SEIU work hard every day to provide for their families and build for them a better future. Our members’ love of and commitment to their families reflect true family values.

Members of SEIU live in a broad array of family structures. Many of us care for and live with family members– including aging parents, grandchildren, adult siblings, and more – who are not recognized by our employers or our government as “family” because they are not related to us by marriage, blood or adoption.

Laws and policies that narrowly define “family” as limited to two legally-married adults of the opposite sex raising their biological children are often used against immigrants, people of color and the working poor who are more likely to live in family structures that differ from this model.

Narrow definitions of family exclude many relationships that our members call family, including relationships with individuals for whom we have primary care-taking responsibility and relationships with individuals with whom we share economic and emotional interdependence.

Government and employer-provided benefits should support individuals with day-to-day responsibilities to care for and financially support minor children and dependent adults in all family forms, and should protect interdependent adult relationships.

Therefore be it resolved:

This convention affirms SEIU’s commitment to valuing all families, and to protecting the widest possible range of family structures.

SEIU will make it a collective bargaining and legislative goal to ensure that all of our members’ families are respected, protected, and enjoy equal rights and benefits.

SEIU will support and advocate for legislative efforts, at all levels of government, that allow workers to define for themselves who will be considered their family.

SEIU will oppose efforts to penalize working people who live in family structures different from the nuclear family model, such as “overcrowding” regulations that seek to restrict who is permitted to live together in one household and have been used to target immigrant communities and communities of color.

Thanks for Nicole Berner, SEIU Associate General Counsel, for bringing this to my attention (and telling me it was based on my book). Berner notes that this resolution allows SEIU to take positions consistent with the resolution without the need for further consideration or action. Thanks also to SEIU General Counsel Judith Scott for her decades of devotion to the labor movement.

NATIONAL UNMARRIED AND SINGLE AMERICANS WEEK

It's the last day of National Unmarried and Single Americans Week. There's been some media coverage, but I thought I'd take this opportunity to highlight one group whose needs remain unmet when marriage is at the center of public policy. Consider CoAbode, whose primary purpose is linking single mothers who want to pool their resources and live together.

In a world in which marriage is privileged to the exclusion of other relationships, two single moms pooling resources to raise their children face a disadvantage. Imagine that the arrangement CoAbode facilitates works out so well that the two women decide to buy a home together. Now when a married couple buys a home together, they are protected from tax penalties when one dies, or when they divorce and transfer ownership from both to one. Not so with unmarried co-owners, no matter how intertwined their life.

Same-sex couples have documented how these laws have disadvantaged them. I tell some of these stories in Chapter 10 of my book. But that doesn't mean the solution is marriage for same-sex couples. That will only help same-sex couples who marry. The solution is a tax system that ensures that no co-owner loses her home due to tax penalties when the other co-owner dies or when one sells her share to the other. That's valuing all families. Thank you, CoAbode, for getting the word out about meeting the needs of women without making marriage the cornerstone of their lives.

INSPIRATION FROM THE COUNCIL ON CONTEMPORARY FAMILIES ANNUAL CONFERENCE

Thank goodness for the Council on Contemporary Families -- a group of scholars, researchers, and clinicians who care about all families and who respond to the right-wing marriage movement's attacks on family diversity. One highlight of the just-concluded annual conference: A paper from RAND researcher Jui-Chung Alan Li reporting findings, using a large data base, that divorce does not cause behavior problems in children. How silly does the vice-president of the right-wing marriage movement group Institute for American Values sound when she responds by saying: "What he's doing is controlling for so many things he's making the effects of divorce disappear"?? It is precisely because the marriage movement does NOT control for many other factors that they can blame all of our social problems on the decline of life-long heterosexual marriage. The CCF conference also featured unabashed feminists! That shouldn't be news, but all too often is when it comes to family policy discussions. Congratulations to Amy DePaul, who received one of the CCF media awards. Feminist bloggers Deborah Siegel and Veronica Arreola were inspirational. By following Veronica's blog, I learned that a paid sick leave bill has been introduced in the Illinois legislature. It defines "family members" to include anyone the employee has lived with for six months. That's moving us closer to valuing all families...although I still would like a state to adopt the definition of "family member" in federal law, which includes "any individual related by blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship." If the federal government can allow its employees to care for their families however they define them, why not states and private employers as well??

TAX TIME -- NOT A REASON TO SUPPORT MARRIAGE EQUALITY

There's much that's wrong with our income tax treatment of families. But when marriage equality advocates argue that same-sex couples face tax disadvantages because they can't marry, they don't tell the whole story. Marriage reduces taxes for couples that have one wage earner, or two wage earners who earn vastly different incomes. In other words, the "traditional" husband-as-wage-earner, wife-as-homemaker family is greatly advantaged by our tax rules. Their "bonus" for being married costs the government $30 billion. When two equal wage earners marry, they pay more taxes. So same-sex couples who marry would simply become a part of this unfair system; those with one primary wage-earner would benefit and those with two more equal wage-earners would lose out. Also, for low income parents, marriage can deprive them of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC); low income gay and lesbian parents who marry in Massachusestts should be grateful that the federal government doesn't consider them married!

Of course these are not arguments AGAINST allowing same-sex couples to marry. It's just that our inequitable income tax system is not a reason to support same-sex marriage either. We need to reduce the significance of marriage in the income tax system. The Alternatives to Marriage Project has the best proposals for this.