The End of Schizoid Taxes?

As in, I'm tired of having to live two entirely contradictory truths.

M. and I file our Massachusetts taxes as a married couple.  Our only choices are "married filing jointly" or "married filing separately".  We opt for the latter.  Why?  Because we file our federal taxes, each of us, as "single."  According to the federal government, we are not married.

So this year, I claimed all sorts of student deductions, and she claimed Asa.  I claimed commuter breaks, she claimed our rent.  Is it fair?  No, not really.  Is it kind of underhanded?  YUP.  Do I look at our taxes and think, "dang, if I were the IRS, I'd audit this one - it just doesn't look right"?  Absolutely - I mean, on the surface, it looks like I have bunches more expenses than income, and wouldn't that make you pause?  Really?

And even so, we're among the lucky ones.  (See more about the less-lucky ones here.)  M.'s work allows me to be on a family health insurance plan, despite being in RI (another place where we are not legally married).  We do live in a state where our relationship is recognized, where I don't have to worry about whether she'd be allowed to visit - or even make decisions - were I hospitalized.  We even got lucky when Asa was born - although not in MA, he was born in a state where M. and I are understood to be married, and both of our names are on his birth certificate.

And yet...

Because we are "not married", we get taxed on my portion of our health plan by both the federal government and the State of Rhode Island.

Because we are "not married", we couldn't change the names on our passports to reflect married hyphenation... even though the Social Security Administration issued us new cards with that new name, and we actually do file even our federal taxes under our married names - you know, the ones that correspond to our social security numbers.

You get the idea.  And, if you've been reading this blog for a while, this is nothing you didn't already know.  So why am I rehashing it all?  Why have I just enumerated all of these discrepancies, all of these discriminatory slights?

Because they might be ending.

Because a U.S. District Judge in Boston ruled, yesterday, in two separate cases, that a) marriage is a states'-rights issue, and b) treating a class of married couples in Massachusetts differently than it treats all other married couples, from MA and elsewhere, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Duh.

What I absolutely love is that the States' Rights question was (and has been) precisely the one used by the opponents of same-sex marriage to deny the validity of the Interstate Commerce Clause - you know, the one in which states agree to respect one another's laws, the one that makes most people's marriage licenses valid from state to state.  It's why so many states were so quick to pass their own Defense of Marriage Acts... and why the one passed by the Federal Government is inherently flawed.  States' Rights.  Ha.

What I love even more is that, although this ruling doesn't extend beyond the cases argued - which were all specifically about Massachusetts - all of the analysis seems to agree that this sets a strong precedent.  (You hear that, CT, VT, NH, IA?  Listen up now, y'all...)  And that precedent says something that is so ridiculously obvious that it's hard not to shout it aloud:

The Federal Government has, for fourteen years, enshrined discrimination into law.  It is time for that to end, and for our government to treat all citizens with equality and justice.  Now.  No more excuses.