Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Later this year when it releases the 2008 American Community Survey, the Department of Commerce will do something it never has done before: Provide data on the number of same-sex marriages in the United States. This decision represents a reversal from previous administrations, especially under President George W. Bush, whose interpretation of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act prevented officials in the Census Bureau from releasing data on same-sex marriages. But a legal opinion published last week by Commerce lawyers concluded the 1996 legislation banning gay marriage did not preclude census takers from including such information.
Even before this decade, the Census Bureau had never included statistics on the number of gay marriages as part of its decennial headcount. That will change with the 2010 census ,which will include raw data showing how many same-sex married couples reside in each state and in the nation as a whole.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Census 2010 to Report Same-Sex Marriage Data (by Ed O’Keefe, Washington Post)
Memo: Collecting and Reporting Census Data Relating to Same-Sex Marriages (General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Commerce)
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