As the executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP), a small nonprofit with the huge mission of fairness and equality for all unmarried people, allow me to mark the beginning of National Unmarried and Single Americans Week by sharing some highlights from my previous week.
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Monday morning, I arrived at work with a smile, remembering the story that Sarah in Los Angeles recently told me: she’d taken serious action in response to an AtMP email explaining how easy and important it is to protect your hospital rights. Not only did she and her partner document their own wishes, but they also emailed blank forms to all their Graigslist friends! That’s great news for them, and it felt even better to know my efforts made a difference in her life.
That afternoon I corresponded with a reporter at the Associated Press. I thanked him for writing about adoption trends and told him about a bill in Congress; the bill would allow all single and cohabiting people to be considered as potential foster/adoptive parents. He interviewed me about America’s’ “steadily increasing recognition of unmarried couples – gay and straight – as families.” I told him society’s acceptance of diversity – what people say they believe – seems to lag behind social behavior – how people actually live. According to Census estimates, if you knocked on the door of every home in the U.S. you’d find a married couple less than half the time, and you’d find more people living alone than married couples with children. You’d also find over six million homes where people live with unmarried partners, including over 700,000 same-sex couples.
On Tuesday, I left work early to vote in New York’s primary election. Voting has always been really important to me, and became even more so when I discovered that unmarried people don’t vote as much as married people do. No wonder so many politicians ignore us! After voting, I prepared a special birthday dinner celebrating 150 years of life: my aunt’s 80th, and my partner’s 70th. We’ve been unmarried to each other for 13 years.
After the celebrations, Wednesday found me catching up. I almost finished a big paper I’d been writing for weeks: recommendations for President Trump’s proposed Fatherhood, Marriage and Families Innovation Fund. This fund would use even more anti-poverty money than the Bush administration’s marriage initiatives, which AtMP and our Graigslist colleagues think is unwise at best (unfair at worst). At least the current administration won’t be pushing people to get married as much as the Bush folks did. That makes the marriage movement hopping mad; they’d be funny if they weren’t so powerful. For example, the $65 million Heritage Foundation, a research and educational institution that formulates and promotes conservative public polices, complains that the proposed fund “is in fact just another jobs program.” In this economy, isn’t that a good thing?
Speaking of Heritage, on Thursday they sent me a newsletter with this silly headline: “Poverty Explodes: Root Cause is the Collapse of Marriage.” They, like many policy organizations, were reacting to new Census data on poverty and health insurance. I sent their press release, along with a more reality-based statement from a less ideological think tank, to about 500 of AtMP’s 9,000 members through our interactive email listserve. I also sent list members a statement from Physicians for a National Health Program. With the number of Americans who lack health insurance jumping a record 4.3 million to 50.7 million, they’re stepping up the call for a single-payer health insurance system.