Op-Ed Contributor: Single and Paying for It:
"Married couples can receive thousands of dollars in benefits and discounts unavailable to single Americans, including extra tax breaks, bankruptcy protections and better insurance rates. Why, for example, should a married poet whose wife pays the bills get tax breaks that are unavailable to a single poet who struggles to write between telemarketing jobs? Why should all workers be required to make the same Social Security contributions if retirees with non-wage-earning spouses get more back from the system? If we force single mothers off welfare on the theory that they should pay their own way, why don't we require married stay-at-home moms to pay market prices for health insurance?

Though most people would agree that these distinctions are arbitrary and unfair, as a society we tend not to notice that breaks for people who are married translate into penalties for those of us who are not.…"

Singles' rights advocates face an uphill battle because their demands for equality are easily mistaken for anti-marriage assaults. Furthermore, because most Americans, myself included, believe that marriage provides a valuable social framework, many are quick to dismiss challenges to marriage-based benefits as a threat to the institution. Though well intentioned, this impulse makes no sense in the face of current realities.

Many marriage-based benefits, for instance, are seen as proxies for helping families with children. Yet marriage is no longer a good indicator of parenthood. As of 2000, one in three children were born to unmarried parents. Distributing benefits intended to support child rearing on the basis of marital status gives a windfall to childless married couples while leaving empty handed single parents and their children — who as a group already face harsher realities.

Benefits are also defended as vehicles for promoting marriage. Their effectiveness in achieving this goal is dubious at best, counterproductive at worst. Common sense says that couples who are otherwise unprepared to take on the obligations of marriage and who do so for financial reasons only are prime candidates for divorce.

Finally, marriage benefits may be seen as a way to reward citizens who take on the weighty obligations of wedlock. But if 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, 50 percent of marriage-based "rewards" are nothing but an expensive mistake. The marriage dole also subsidizes a growing number of unions governed by prenuptial agreements. Such pacts are usually intended to protect the assets of moneyed spouses, effectively undoing the very protections that, in part, make marriage worth defending in the first place.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/opinion/25MOTR.html