The Economic Closet: The Business Case for Gay Marriage

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/the-economic-closet-the-business-case-for-gay-marriage.html



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. 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—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.) 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, 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.



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