Commerce, Justice, Science, And Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. Mr. Chairman, I would like to congratulate Chairman Mollohan and his staff for their hard work on H.R. 2847.

I feel it is necessary, however, to highlight what I feel is an egregious error on the part of the U.S. Census Bureau, the misrepresentation of data collected in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

Last month, I, along with 51 of my colleagues, sent a letter to the Director of Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, expressing concern over the U.S. Census Bureau's intention to continue altering data of same-sex married couples in the reporting of the 2010 census.

With same-sex marriage now legal in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, it is crucial to accurately represent the collection of data for same-sex married couples. Currently, if same-sex married couples in these States list themselves as married, the U.S. Census Bureau will go back and manually alter the data.

The U.S. Census Bureau was created to collect data and provide the American public with accurate reporting on the population, not to collect data and then alter it based on political decisions. I hope the Obama administration will reconsider this policy and direct the Department of Commerce to provide the American public with an accurate representation of LGBT families in the U.S. census.

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