Wednesday, October 7, 2009

It costs to be gay!

I was struck recently by an article that my mom (shout out to my Momma y'all) sent me on the cost of being gay. Often the arguments around legalizing gay marriage are all about God, damnation, hellfire, and brimstone, but what about the actual cost benefits that people are missing out on when they aren't allowed to legally recognize their love? What do those numbers look like?

Well some wonderful reporters at the NYT took it upon themselves to answer just that question and finally put some numbers to what many of my same-sex coupled friends having been saying for a long time, it just costs more to be gay and have a family. In fact, as you can see in the linked article from the NYT it can actually cost over the course of a lifetime for a same-sex couple with two children from $41,196 more in the best case scenario to $467,562 more in the worst case scenario, just by not getting the same treatment opposite-sex married couples are afforded every day. The really sad part is that if the federal government would just pony up and legalize gay marriage already, almost all of that cost difference would be wiped away. While clearly this analysis and article had to be made with many assumptions around income, health insurance, etc, I really recommend reading it as it so beautifully lays out the many ways that same-sex couples are not afforded the same privileges as opposite-sex couples, and how that can greatly impact them financially.

And as always, I would like to reiterate our blog's collective desire to see the legalization of same-sex marriage and see people given equal right across the board. I will yet again say that I think it is a sad sad state of affairs that we live in a country where legally a 13 year old girl can get married with the consent of her parents and the court but two loving and consenting adults of the same sex cannot.

NYT Article

1 comment:

Joe said...

Right on. Just legalize it already. Obama's renunciation of DOMA was def. a step in the right direction.