On NPR.org, from FOBG Nancy Goldstein (married to super-cool cartoonist):

The cost of love isn’t an abstract concept in my household: It’s precisely $1,820 per year. That’s the “gay tax” we shell out for me to be on my wife’s health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income.

The media’s primary focus on the morality debate around same-sex marriage means that most of the public, gay or straight, knows little about the very real economic costs of inequality. It doesn’t matter that Joan and I married in Massachusetts five years ago this week, or that our home state recognizes our marriage. It makes no difference that she works for a progressive company with an active LGBT employees group. Companies pay for their employees’ health insurance with pretax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn’t federally recognized.

Read the rest here.

The other night I swung by the legendary Algonquin Hotel for a discussion — sadly, not at the round table — on the new book Sex and Sensibility: Ten Women Examine the Lunacy of Modern Love…in 200 Cartoons. (Not to be confused with this Sex and Sensibility, which contains an essay by BG’s alter ego entitled “Someone Old, Someone Blue.”)

Anyway: gasp! A gaggle of cartoonists (including BG idol Roz Chast!) on a mission to figure out this whole love thang? Sounds like BG’s got a backup team! Much of the group’s discussion actually centered on whether or not men and women find different things funny, and why that might be. (No final conclusions were drawn, but everyone found the discussion funny, so I guess that’s saying something.)

Liza Donnelly, the book’s editor — and a staff cartoonist at the New Yorker (thus a superhero of sorts) — also mentioned to me that she is working on another book of cartoons about marriage with her fellow-cartoonist husband. Will it be full of actual solutions? Probably not. But is it fun to imagine the two of them hanging around their apartment saying things like, “You don’t have to go to this party. It’s ‘Men Optional,'” or “Now that our last is off to college, could you tell me who the hell you are?” Oh yeah.