[Vision2020] The Economic Closet: The Business Case for Gay Marriage

[Art Deco]

 February 27, 2013
The Economic Closet: The Business Case for Gay Marriage
Posted by Amy Davidson<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/amy_davidson/search?contributorName=Amy%20Davidson>

[image: h_14301663-233.jpg]

Three hundred sixty-three thousand and fifty-three dollars was the amount
that Edith Windsor was assessed in federal estate taxes when her wife, Thea
Spyer, died in 2009. Zero dollars, everyone agrees, would have been the
amount she owed if the federal government had recognized their marriage, as
the state of New York already did. There are other numbers that are more
relevant to their story—like forty-four, the number of years they spent
with each other; or twenty-two, the share of those years during which Spyer
lived with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, the disease that eventually
killed her—and that Windsor gave up her own job to nurse her through. There
were the numbers Windsor worked while getting a graduate degree in
mathematics in the nineteen-fifties, and those in the early computer codes
that she wrote for the Atomic Energy Commission’s UNIVAC and at I.B.M.,
where she was, at the time, one of very few women programmers. But the
difference between zero and three hundred sixty-three thousand and
fifty-three is what gives Windsor standing to bring a case challenging the
Defense of Marriage
Act<http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/02/doma-plaintiffs-brief-filed/>.
The Supreme Court will hear her case on March 27th, and, the day before, it
will hear another one challenging Proposition 8, California’s ban on
same-sex marriage.

How much does money matter when thinking about same-sex marriage, or about
marriage at all? The essence of the debate—and certainly its emotional
heart—lies with words like family and respect, honor and honesty, and,
above all, love. But those words, and even more so others—security,
protection, sickness and health, home and career—are not divorced from
finances. This is particularly true when any one of them is used in the
same sentence as “children.” Another number to add to the equation: eleven
hundred and thirty-eight, which is the number of federal laws that rely on
a definition of marriage. Many more of them are about money, in one way or
the other, than about love. Nor is the concern simply that of the family
involved: companies have an interest, too, as does the larger business
world, in not having families live in what might be called an economic
closet.

That there is a business case for marriage equality was confirmed this week
with the news that at least sixty major corporations will file an amicus
curiae brief in support of overturning Prop.
8<http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/26/corporate-america-gay-marriage/?hpt=hp_t3>—a
move, depending on how the Court writes the decision, that could establish
a right to same-sex marriage not only in California but in the country as a
whole. (Some leading Republicans are also submitting a
brief<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/02/ken-mehlmans-republican-gay-marriage-mission.html>.)
More may sign on before the filing deadline on Thursday. The companies
range from Apple to Xerox, with everyone from Levi Strauss, Cisco, Morgan
Stanley, Nike, and Panasonic in between. *Fortune* got a draft of the
brief<http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2013/02/26/corporate-america-gay-marriage/?hpt=hp_t3#sthash.McP1KX1e.dpuf>,
which reads in part

By singling out a group for less favorable treatment, Proposition 8 impedes
businesses from achieving the market’s ideal of efficient
operations—particularly in recruiting, hiring, and retaining talented
people who are in the best position to operate at their highest capacity.
Amici are competing domestically and internationally with companies inside
and outside the United States in places where all couples, regardless of
whether they are of the same sex, are afforded equal access to marriage.

 If one believes that protecting children is a priority, then so is
same-sex marriage. A third of lesbian couples and a fifth of gay couples
who live together already have children, according to the Census, and a
lack of access to marriage takes both social and economic security away
from them. A widow or widower with a minor child whose income falls below a
certain level can get social-security benefits based on the deceased
spouse’s earnings—but not if the spouse is of the same sex. The same is
true of tax laws, like the one affecting Windsor, that might cost families
their homes. Some opponents of same-sex marriage have turned this on its
head and wondered if it will cost the government too much money. The
answer, according to a Congressional Budget Office
study<http://www.cbo.gov/publication/15740>,
is that it most likely will not, both because the amounts, though large in
the life of, say, a widow with a child, are not so large in terms of the
federal budget. The government will also make money from things like
imposing the income-tax marriage penalty on more couples, and from some
people losing eligibility for benefits when their combined income is
calculated. (There are harder-to-answer questions, like how much it might
save Medicare if, earlier in life, a person had access to preventive care
through a spouse’s insurance.) Marriage equality does not inflate budgets;
it removes irrational distortions from them.

And that is why, if one believes in protecting free markets, then same-sex
marriage should be a priority, too. This is the point that the amicus brief
made with regard to recruiting. It hurts companies and the economy when the
choice in taking a job at one firm or the other is not based on its salary
offer or a belief in its prospects, but by whether it is based in a state
the recognizes the employee’s marriage. It hurts, too, when a spouse who is
a foreign citizen is not welcome here. And—something the corporate brief
also mentions—there is the wedding business to consider, too. Last summer,
New York City estimated that it gained two hundred and fifty-nine million
dollars from same-sex marriages in the first year that they were legal in
the state. “Marriage equality has made our city more open, inclusive, and
free—and it has also helped to create jobs and support our economy,” Mayor
Bloomberg said<http://money.cnn.com/2012/07/24/pf/gay-marriage-economic-impact/index.htm>.


But there are less obvious ways that a failure to recognize same-sex
marriage can reduce the transparency that helps the private sector thrive.
For example, the Windsor brief notes that DOMA has the effect of exempting
same-sex spouses of politicians and public officials from
financial-disclosure requirements. It also denies them the protection of
laws that, for example, make threatening the spouse of a federal agent a
crime.

I.B.M. didn’t know it at the time, but it came close to losing Edith
Windsor when, as her brief recounts, it “unwittingly ran afoul” of an
executive order that forbade companies with federal contracts from having
gay or lesbian employees—the order was issued in 1953, the year before the
computer pioneer Alan Turing, who had faced similar barriers in Great
Britain, killed himself by eating a poisoned
apple<http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2011/08/alan-turings-apple.html>.
Luckily, the F.B.I. didn’t ask Windsor about the women in her life when
interviewing her for a security clearance (to work on that UNIVAC), and
I.B.M. didn’t find out, either; she wore a diamond pin, rather than a ring,
as a symbol of her long engagement to Spyer. And then she left the company
to care for a woman who, for many years, she could only say was a friend.

*Photograph by Chester Higgins, Jr./The New York Times/Redux.*
Comments


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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