So Tell Me Something I Don't Know

The New York Times discovers that it is expensive to be a gay couple, much more expensive than being a hetero married couple.

So we set out to determine what they were and to come up with a round number — a couple’s lifetime cost of being gay.

It was much more complicated than we initially imagined, and that’s probably why we’ve never seen similar efforts. We looked at benefits that routinely go to married heterosexual couples but not to gay couples, like certainSocial Security payments. We plotted out the cost of health insurance for couples whose employers don’t offer it to domestic partners. Even tax preparation can cost more, since gay couples have to file two sets of returns. ...

Nearly all the extra costs that gay couples face would be erased if the federal government legalized same-sex marriage.

Well duh.

And even where an employer does provide partner benefits, it's usually so grudging, and there is such a sharp disparity in treatment between straight and gay couples.