"This has been a question we've been looking at for quite a long time... It's not something the bureau could arbitrarily or casually decide to change on a whim, because our data is used by virtually every federal agency.... We're not destroying data; we are keeping that data," O'Connell said. "We are just showing the data published in a way that is consistent with the way every other agency publishes their data.''

Martin O'Connell, chief of the Census Bureau's Fertility and Family Statistics Branch, trying to justify why the U.S. 2010 Census will purposefully have legally married same-sex couples be recorded as "unmarried partners," even in California and Massachusetts, as a reaction to the federal Defense of Marriage Act and other mandates. (San Jose Mercury News)