Unmarried and Single Americans Ask, “Do the Candidates Know We Exist?”

Awareness Week Begins Sunday

National Unmarried and Single Americans Week – starting Sunday, September 21st – reminds us that society should neither privilege nor penalize the state of being married as distinct from other important caring and interdependent relationships. On average, American adults spend as much time outside marriage as in it. Married couples are a shrinking portion of households, of parents, and of the workforce. Business practice and government policy must catch up: American adults deserve full respect and equal opportunity, not prejudice and clumsy social engineering.

The Alternatives to Marriage Project fights marital status discrimination and the stigma against being single or unmarried. During USA Week, AtMP urges media to explore the unmarried experience in two newsworthy arenas: the election and health care.

Election 2008: Roughly 85 million unmarried people are eligible to vote. Equal percentages of married and unmarried 20-25 year olds report that they vote regularly (30%) and try to influence others’ votes (35%). Single women’s voting rates increased dramatically in 2006 and again in the February 2008 primaries. Unmarried households are the majority in four of the seven “toss-up” states: Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

Unmarried people will not be persuaded to register and vote unless they hear candidates speak to their concerns. Rhetoric about same-sex marriage fails to cure the thousands of laws that use marital status to allocate public resources. Singles hear rhetoric about working families as exclusive and dismissive – not because they don’t have families, but because their families (which may include unmarried partners, disabled siblings, aging parents, or loyal neighbors) are not recognized when it comes to taxes, social security and particularly health care.

Health Care Reform: The public easily recognizes and ridicules the fact that people get married for health insurance. Outrage begins to build with stories of young adults, military survivors or senior citizens who cannot marry, or abused spouses who cannot divorce, because doing so would cause them to lose health insurance. Only a single payer system promises unmarried people truly equal access to health insurance. Stripping marital status discrimination out of intermediate reforms would reduce the number of uninsured Americans: 18% of unmarried 18-64 year olds have no health insurance, compared to 12% of married people.

Insurance is never the whole story on health care. Unmarried people relate viscerally when someone is fired for taking time off to care for his fiancé, or is shut out of a hospital room though she is the only person who knows what treatment the patient wants. AtMP calls for reforms to give more unmarried people access to paid sick leave, leave to care, and recognition as health care decision makers.

Staff and members of the Alternatives to Marriage Project can provide expert analysis and personal anecdotes on these and other topics. Reporters may call Nicky Grist, Executive Director, at 718-788-1911 or click here to email inquiries.