WASHINGTON, March 13, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Census Bureau released a Census 2000 report on married- and unmarried-couple households today. The 16-page report, Married-Couple and Unmarried-Partner Households: 2000, indicates that homosexual couples account for only 1 percent of all couples – married and non-married. Of the 60 million households headed by couples, 0.6 million were headed by same-sex partners. The report marks the first time the Census Bureau has issued a census report on ‘unmarried partners’.
Census 2000 enumerated 105.5 million households in the United States, of which the majority (52 percent) were maintained by married couples (54.5 million). 5.5 million couples were enumerated as living together but who were not married, up from 3.2 million in 1990. These unmarried-partner households were self-identified on the census form as being maintained by non-related people who were sharing living quarters and who also had a close personal relationship with each other. The majority of these unmarried-partner households had partners of the opposite sex (4.9 million) but about 1 in 9 of these same-sex unmarried-partner households, 301,000 had male partners and 293,000 had female partners.
The report and tables may be found on the Internet at https://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-5.pdf