It looks like Obama's administration will continue the practice of making many gay and lesbian couples pay more in taxes and receive fewer of the benefits of citizenship in return.
Here's a new penalty that's probably coming: The planned middle class tax cut/stimulus will probably be based on a reduction in withholding of $1,000 per couple or $500 per individual. So a married straight couple with one salaried spouse and one stay-at-home (or unemployed) spouse will get $1,000. And a same-sex couple with one salaried partner* and one stay-at-home (or unemployed) partner* will get ... well, you can do the math.
Of course, the same-sex couple is already penalized by America's wonderful tax code. For example, the working partner* can't file jointly and can't even declare the non-working partner* as a dependent unless the non-working partner* is nearly totally dependent on the worker. But there's a potential risk in claiming him or her as a dependent: The IRS could then say that the working partner* should be paying gift taxes on the value of the support (rent or mortgage, food, utilities, etc.) provided.
And these aren't the only tax penalties of being gay: If the working partner* is fortunate enough to have an employer who provides domestic partner benefits, and gets health insurance for her/his partner* that way, the working partner* has to pay taxes on the employer's cost of coverage, adding another substantial hit to the costs of being gay. (Straight married couples, of course, get couple or family coverage as an untaxed fringe benefit.)
These are only a few of the federal tax consequences of being a gay man or lesbian in America, and I haven't even mentioned all the added costs at the state level.
So here's my question:
Who among you believes anything will have changed by the time Obama leaves office four or eight years from now? And who suspects everything will be pretty much the same because ... well, because "God's in the mix" on marriage, Obama says, which means same-sex couples are most definitely out of the mix. That attitude, plus what the Rick Warren selection demonstrates about Obama's likely intention to continue sucking up to the fundagelicals, means equality for gay and lesbian Americans will be just too damned politically expensive for Obama and Congressional Democrats.
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* I use the word "partner" in the everyday sense, of course. In America, legally speaking, a same-sex couple is really just two "legal strangers."