Sunday, April 20, 2008 | Opinion
Gay Marriage Is So Money

I have to admit that it gets to me....

Two gay men hold signs during a same sex marriage demonstration October 15, 2007 in San Francisco

CREDIT: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

I want to get married. But as a lesbian I cannot, and I have to admit that it gets to me. My girlfriend and I have been together for more than two years, and if I were a man people would be expecting me to begin plans for my very romantic proposal. But since we’re women, no one is really expecting us to do anything but perpetually date. And even if I was planning a unique proposal for my girlfriend, without the legal rights that come with straight marriage, it would be like buying a counterfeit concert ticket: The engagement ring is the ticket, but they won’t let me into the show.

So exactly why can’t we get married? Of course we’ve heard the religious right using the topic as a polarizing and distracting issue during the election season, but let’s pretend that separation of church and state actually exists in America, and I’ll ask again: Why can’t we get married?

I can propose one reason why gays should be able to get legally married, and it’s one that, unfortunately, I have not heard from anyone else: Money.

We are a very money-oriented society, so if we present the value of gay marriage as an economic issue, rather than a human rights issue, I think the wedding industry would lobby for our cause from coast to coast.

Allow me to don my math hat and geek-taped glasses, so I can demonstrate what I mean. According to a Wedding Budget Worksheet I found online, there are 45 purchases necessary for a wedding. Forty-five.

Now, I added the average dollar amounts to each of those line items, and the grand total came to $28,800 for an average straight wedding. For simplicity’s sake, let’s focus on just one of those line items—flowers.

According to the Wedding Report, the average cost of flowers per wedding is $2,048. Now take the fact that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 2.4 million couples who marry every year in this country, and the estimated total spent on flowers annually in American weddings is $4,915,200,000. That’s right, almost $5 billion.

And that’s just for flowers.

The Census Bureau estimates that there are 707,196 gay couples in the U.S. (of course, these are couples who actually identified themselves as gay on the census, so the accurate number is probably higher), and let’s assume that half of them would marry if it were legal for them to do so.

Based on this, how much more revenue would florists make in wedding flowers from legalized gay marriages? The answer is $1,488,337,408—almost $1.5 billion.

And as I said, that’s just for flowers.

Any Fortune 500 company would immediately jump on an opportunity to make that kind of new profit, so why not the government? After all, it will be raking in the taxes on those flowers, not to mention everything else, plus the actual marriage license fees, etc.

So the next time supporters of gay marriage lobby lawmakers to legalize it, they can strengthen their position by taking along a CPA to help explain that to financially get further into the “black” requires every color in the rainbow. SP
Melissa Carter is co-host of “The Bert Show” on Q100 and the syndicated radio program “Twist.” She’s filling in for News Editor Stephanie Ramage this week.