Count Us In

Gay US representatives Tammy Baldwin, Barney Frank and Jared Polis, along with 48 other congressional members, recently sent a letter to Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag asking that the 2010 Census count same-sex married couples rather than altering their status.

See, last year, the Bush regime--citing the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex unions--declared that lawfully married same-sex couples who marked “married” on their census forms would have their status changed to “unmarried partners” in the final count.

Now, congressional members are calling on Orszag to reverse course.

The U.S. Census Bureau conducts its survey every 10 years, and during the last census, no state had legalized same-sex marriages. Now, however, we have the great states of Iowa, Vermont and Massachusetts; meanwhile, Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire have approved marriage-equality laws that will be in effect by the time of the count. And let's not forget that there are some 18,000 same-sex marriages currently in question in California that are reportedly unlikely to be annulled by the state supreme court even if Prop H8 is upheld.

The thing about the census: if you don't count us, we don't count.