Onely.Org

We’re BACK! (With one little quote) July 25, 2014

Beloved Copious Readers,

We’ve missed you! Many of you blog yourselves, so you know how sometimes life has a way of rudely inserting itself between your fingers and the keyboard.

For now, we’d like to offer you just a tidbit of Singles-Power to carry with you during dry spells when Onely or the other singles’ advocacy blogs you may follow (or write!) are not posting regularly. We’d like to present you with a pithy quote to tide you over during those dark days when it seems as if everyone around you is taking for granted that married people ought to be favored over unmarried people.

But first, some background: Many of you know that we here at Onely believe the institution of marriage is over-privileged. Married people receive too many rights at the expense of unmarried people. It’s discrimination that no one sees.

The playing field needs to be evened out. Tax professionals, legal experts, lawmakers, business owners and others with expertise in social planning need to start rethinking how to behave towards marriage. They need to start figuring out how to untangle marriage from random rights, such as–to name just one of over a thousand examples in the U.S. federal code alone–the right to set up an IRA for their spouse (single people usually can’t help anyone out by setting up an IRA for them, except maybe dependents).

Our power-brokers need to help facilitate these readjustments, but they won’t–because they don’t see a problem or disparity.

When Lisa and I wrote an article about the financial aspects of this discrimination for Atlantic.com, some people opened their eyes and said, “Wow, that’s a really good point!” But go look at the comments section.  Many other readers opened their eyes and said, “Wow, we hate you!” (Meaning: “You messed with our entrenched world view!”)

One of our more subtle haters was a “tax professional” who sent us at least two multi-page emails calculating and re-calculating the “reasons” married people get more screwed by the IRS than single people. Even though we politely explained that our Atlantic story was representative and accurate, if not comprehensive, and even though we explained that we had consulted our own tax professional, she kept insisting that it’s the singles, not the marrieds, who win out in the end.

People, it’s not a contest–it’s a problem.

We were surprised that Atlantic.com produced so many haters, because we had assumed their readership would include exactly the smart, liberal demographic you’d imagine would go for the kind of massive paradigm shift required to end discrimination of any sort–including marital status discrimination.

But no, not necessarily. (We had the same problem at Change.org–this very liberal site barfed up more than one hater when I wrote about marital status discrimination for my women’s right column.)

But anyway, as we started to say in the beginning before we got distracted by our multi-paragraph “Background” extravaganza, we’d like to offer you a relevant quote we hope you will carry with you until the next time we post and you honor us with your readership:

THERE ARE SOME IDEAS SO WRONG ONLY A VERY INTELLIGENT PERSON COULD BELIEVE IN THEM.

–Quote by George Orwell

–All other blatherings by Christina