The debate over gay marriage has long “focused on God and Scripture, the Constitution, and equal protection,” said Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber in The New York Times. But there’s also a financial cost. Looking at factors such as health insurance, Social Security, taxes, and pensions, we calculated “a couple’s lifetime cost of being gay”—in the best case for our average gay couple, it cost $41,196; in the worst case, $467,562.
Finally, an analysis of the “financial discrimination” we gay couples face, said Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic. This is not some “abstract issue,” and if the shoe were on the other foot, “no heterosexual would tolerate—or even imagining tolerating—it.” Besides, since the government’s anti-gay-marriage policies “encourage gay people not to form stable, lasting relationships,” they also have a big societal cost.
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