Lewd and lacivious cohabitation

Although at the moment I don't blog every day I would say that not a day passes without something I could blog about occuring to me. Today its been the whole pope thing which completely ruined my morning of listening to KQED Forum and Talk of the Nation. I'd mentally started a blog about the irony of Bush railing against undemocratic leaders and countries while just today 1 billion Catholics were celebrating their voluntary subjugation to an undemocratically elected leader who could literally dictate their every behaviour and conduct (assuming they aren't "a la carte" Catholics)...

Whether I would post that blog entry I don't know - probably I don't need to now - 'nuff said. As it turns out the IRS just provided me with a more juicy and blog worthy topic, and one much less likely to be lost in the noise of all the other pope-centric blog entries today.

What happened was I on Thursday I tried to e-file my federal taxes as I've done for as many years as its been possible. To my surprise they bounced them back telling me that someone else had already filed a 1040 claiming my dependent as their dependent. I was like WTF! This lead me with no alternative but to file by mail which wouldn't have been a big deal normally except that Uncle Sam owes me a not inconsiderable amount of cash this year. Yes, thanks to not working for a year now I was actually in the enviable position of having to pay less federal taxes for 2004 than I paid my local Alameda County in taxes. That gave me a good feeling because I know that Alameda County will put my money to much better use than Uncle Sam - if nothing else because AC doesn't spend 50% of its budget on military purposes.

Anyway, I digress... this morning I called up Uncle Sam to ask "What gives" (no I didn't tell them "WTF!") and a very helpful man from the IRS proceeded to tell me what would happen next. Basically they'll investigate - but that's by the by. What really made my jaw drop was when he asked "Have you checked that your local city or state laws don't prohibit cohabitation with an opposite sex dependent?". At that point I really did have to bite my tongue to avoid an utterence of "WTF!" In fact I was thinking it so hard I'm sure he could feel my mental disconbobulations all the way over in Florida. How did I know he was in Florida? Well because he proceeded to say "Oh yes, in Florida its illegal to cohabit with an opposite sex dependent and we would deny your claim if you lived in Florida". What is more he went on to tell me there are no less than seven states that have equivalent laws and hence where my claim would be denied. Now naturally this wouldn't apply if we were married, and interestingly I wonder if it would apply my dependent and I were same sex. I'm also wondering WTF the IRS is taking into consideration state and city laws in levying of Federal taxes - surely that's up to the individual states to do in their state tax computations???

Natuarally I had to go and find out more about this, and no it wasn't April 1st and no he wasn't pulling my leg. I found an article that lists Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia as the seven deadly states I should not ever consider living in unlawful unwedded lewd and lacivious cohabitation. The article cites instances of companies people to reveal such information on job application forms, of judges requiring defendents to get married, move out or be charged, and all kinds of other discrimination based on this lewd and lacivious cohabitation.

And then there's the news that Virginia has only just repealed its law against sex between unmarried people, but isn't yet ready to strike their sodomy laws from the books. All I can say is thank goodness I live in California where all I have to worry about is identity theft from the shoe store and taxation without representation by a former bodybuilder and movie star.