Discrimination against single people
Yay! Alison Lobron in the Boston Globe wrote exactly what I’ve been saying! Rewarding married people with health insurance and other benefits from their spouses’ jobs is discriminatory to single people:
“Our country’s habit of passing out financial perks based on marital status is hardly a time-honored tradition. According to marriage historian Stephanie Coontz, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that US governments and corporations began using marital status as a way to decide who got which benefits. ‘The development of the welfare state here was more attached to marriage than to individual rights,’ she says.
Extending the privileges of one spouse to the other might have made sense back when women were often required to leave the workforce upon marriage. But now it’s hopelessly dated. ‘Why should my access to health care depend on whom I’m sleeping with?’ Coontz says. ‘It’s a good reason to argue for the state to develop other ways to extend health insurance and benefits.’”
Proponents of gay marriage should heed this, since they often argue that allowing gays to marry is the only way to have equality. Actually, they just want to join with married straight people to discriminate against singles. True equality will only happen when married people no longer get benefits that single people don’t get. The best way to do that is for the government to get out of the marriage business altogether.