Sex discrimination

No - not a rant on what message we should take from the failure of yet another aggressive but apparently competent woman in the Apprentice ... nor Hillary's failure to get the US nomination - but a question of why the public authorities are so obsessed with whether people are sleeping together. 

The immediate cause of this reflection is a letter I am having to write to the New Zealand High Commission.  NZ needs people - the big signs above passport control at immigration implore departing passengers to stay in the country ("no need to go...."); she has a job in a shortage profession; but she wants to take her partner and the NZ authorities need to know that they have been living together at the same address for the past year before they are prepared to let them come in as a de facto couple. If for some reason, they had been part of the Microtrend "Living apart together" (remember UK leadership on that one) - they would have had to live even further apart - one staying behind in the UK. 

The second prompt is the first civil partnership in my team - taking place tomorrow.  As the cake makers in LA are finding out, civil partnerships or gay marriages are a whole new source of parties and happiness.  But the fact that friends sleep together (unless of course they are Anglican priests who can enjoy the fiscal privileges of civil partnership but should not of course do anything vaguely dodgy) also conveys a whole bunch of fiscal privileges denied to mere friends -- or as the battling sisters found out at the European court, to people who had lived together and looked after each other all their life.

Why does the act of sleeping with someone bring with it all these benefits courtesy of the taxpayer  - while other arrangements are not so favoured? (the weirdest example of this was when I asked if I could bring an Australian friend was visiting to a party at No.10 to  view Trooping the Colour from Downing Street - but wasn't allowed to because he was "just a friend" and thus failed the Principal Private Secretary's sleeping together test).  This is of course because we start from the premise of favouring marriage; marriage is about sex ... and children... but then we end discrimination (rightly) against other forms of sex - but lose the rationale for the taxpayer subsidy and introduce new and even less justifiable borderlines.

So what to do? Accept variation.  Convey benefits attached to the raising of children (which has some public good elements) - and then, for the rest,  let every individual have the ability to convey some companionship rights on a named individual(some pension transfer; a bit of tax privilege if we want) or translate them into a cashable equivalent if they need to buy those benefits from the market, because they can't bribe anyone else to provide them for free.  And stop being so fussed about what people do in the bedroom - after all, the evidence shows more and more married couples are opting for his and her sleeping arrangements...  will they lose their pension rights?