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Where does civil rights meet Occupy Wall Street?  Income inequality.  I was treated to a proper stack-blowing this morning with the release of a study at UCLA’s Williams Institute.  The report, titled “Restoring Shared Prosperity: Strategies to Cut Poverty and Expand Economic Growth” (a helluvun innocuous title for such an upsetting topic), details how LGBT people, particularly lesbians and transgenders, are far more likely to suffer severe income inequality than their straight neighbors.  Some scary tidbits:

-64% of Transgendered people make less than $25,000 a year (basically a low-to-minimum wage, hourly job).  This is most likely because, in many states, they can be fired or not hired to begin with on the basis of their orientation.

-Older lesbian couples are twice as likely to live in poverty as the straights-next-door.  This is because women still make 78 cents to a man’s dollar.  Two women, two hits.

“Work a little harder, then!”  Huh?  It doesn’t matter if they do?  They get pinched at tax time?

Melissa Boteach, manager of Half in Ten, a campaign that aims to reduce American poverty in half within 10 years, said of her study this doozy, “A married heterosexual couple with $45,000 in income filing their taxes jointly would get a $50 refund from the federal government.  A same-sex couple has to file separately, and they would owe $2,165 in taxes.”

$45,000 isn’t a lot to begin with when Chobani Yogurts are a buck-thirty at the grocery store.  Can you imagine the leg up this would give same-sex couples, especially those with children, if they didn’t have to pay that extra 5% of their yearly paycheck because the Pope says so.

The remedies Boteach recommends to fix this include passage of President Obama’s American Jobs Act, as well as, of course, marriage equality.

The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) prohibits us from filing jointly, no matter if you married in Massachusetts.  And when DOMA goes away, people not in the seven current places gays can get married (Mass, New Hampshire, Vermont, Iowa, Connecticut, New York, D.C.) are stuck with this tax burden as well.  Couples.  Elderly couples.  Families.  Children.  They all face this crushing burden, even when the economy takes an upswing.

I hope I effectively conveyed to you what an infuriating and permanent problem this is for committed gay couples.  This should be your best argument for equality.