The 'Can't Get Married' Penalty

High-handed straight moralists warn that there's a penalty to be paid for "choosing" to be gay. Empires fall, they tell us, because gays live among their people. The Bible, they cry, makes it clear that God will smite the nations that extend the hand of civil equality to gays and shun "natural" marriage. And children are "recruited" into gay "lifestyles" by their same-sex parents.

One could counter all these assertions where they live, citing history's chapter and verse to show that, for example, the Roman empire did not crumble because its leaders were gay (they were corrupt, yes, and crazy) but because of a host of economic and political issues--not the least of which was the arrogant assumption of the Roman aristocracy that the world was ordained by the gods to be theirs for the taking. Their own delusions (not the sexuality of their citizens) led to their downfall. (That's something that might strike us as a bit too familiar, following the "spend but don't tax" frenzy of the last administration, the financial meltdown's origins in a fundamentally superstitious belief in perpetually generous gods of lucre, and our endless, profligately expensive adventure in Iraq.)

Or one might examine the rhetoric's shell-game of words and meaning. What, exactly, is "natural" marriage, if not commitment to another person that arises from one's own natural impulses toward love, protection, and devotion? How are the impulses of gays to shelter and embrace life partners of the same sex less "natural" than the mating habits of straights?

One might even trot out hard science: the growing list of seeming physiological variations between gays and straights, for instance. Or, on the social sciences front, the studies that show that when you look at the effect on children of single motherhood then, yes, it's better for kids to be brought up by loving couples--but the genders of the couples involved seem not to matter: kids with same-sex parents, according to studies that actually look at gay and straight two-parent homes, do just as well in life as kids with mixed-gender parents.

Nebulous claims about "natural marriage," "God's plan," and "morality" aside, however, it turns out that there really is a hard and measurable cost to being gay: same-sex couples shell out big bucks. You could call it the "Can't Get Married Penalty."

An Oct. 2 New York Times article by Finance reporter Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber spelled out the real-world financial cost of the penalties inflicted on gay and lesbian families, finding that committed same-sex couples pay more--a lot more--over the course of their family life than do heterosexual couples: anywhere from about $50,000 to around half a million, assuming a fifty-year span of shared life.

Imagine that! What do you suppose straight couples would have to say if it were demonstrated that by "choosing" to be straight and committed, they were paying a tremendous amount more, out of pocket, than singles or gays? Do you suppose they'd say that was unfair? Do you think they'd gripe that they were being subjected to a second-class citizenship of the wallet? I wager they'd do all those things and then even make the ludicrous claim that they don't "choose" to be straight at all, and therefore are the victims of discrimination.

There are more important things in life than money, obviously. And by obviously, I mean just look at the gay and lesbian couples who, contrary to the slanders leveled at them that they are "promiscuous" and uninterested in family life, square their shoulders and offer up the toll they're forced to pay for their family lives. Clearly, something is more important to those gay families than the wealth they are forced to surrender just to remain together.

Indeed, gay and lesbian families, if anyone, are living proof that there are values that transcend the balance sheet or the account ledger. Straights seem to think that gays are automatically richer than heterosexuals, but they aren't: in fact, a higher proportion of gay families than straights fall on the low side of the income curve. As a demographic, gay men earn less than their straight counterparts; then they're slammed from all sides, whether by having to pay tax on health benefits for their same-sex spouses (assuming they can get family coverage at all), having to pay more in legal fees to secure what rights and protections they can manage in lieu of the more than 1,000 rights that mixed-gender couples receive the moment they say their wedding vows, or--at the end of their lives together--the ferocious taxation they face in estate taxes. (A Dec. 8 EDGE article on Siegel Bernard and Lieber's findings advised that the best time to die, for gay couples at least, will be next year: there will be no federal estate taxes levied in 2010. Paul Cameron, the discredited psychologist who has made a career out of claims that gays die young because, well, because they're gay, must be sharpening his pencils in anticipation.)

What gay families know--and what the heterosexuals who vote against their rights don't seem to comprehend--is that being gay carries heavy penalties with it that make the very idea anyone "choosing" to be gay laughable. It's hard to quantify for straight voters, clerics, and lawmakers the payout that's extorted from us spiritually, physically, and emotionally, day by day, court ruling by court ruling, slander by slander, and election cycle by election cycle, throughout our lives.

But everybody understands money, even--especially--the churches that solicit and donate so much of it in the pursuit of harming our families. Here we have numbers, for those who need them, to demonstrate what we've been saying all along: we do pay a higher price than straights, and it's straights who extort it from us.

But to go home to a spouse and a family in a home built and paid for so dearly: that makes the ties we forge all the more valuable to us. Perhaps that's something that anti-gay lawmakers and clerics, who endlessly exhort the sanctity of family, will one day come to understand: that we pay a higher price, but we pay it willingly, in order to protect the same things we're told we endanger--home, hearth, and kin.