CARNAL NATION

Dear same-sex couples: you may not exist—officially speaking, anyway—in California and 43 other other states, but at last, there's some good news. The 2010 census will no longer class you with Sasquatch, the Chupacabra, or Nessie. The Census Bureau has announced that it will reverse a long-standing policy against counting same-sex marriages. Even after two states legalized same-sex marriages, the Bureau maintained that it could not count marriages conducted under those states' laws because the Defense of Marriage Act forbade federal agencies from acknowledging them. A legally-married parent with a partner of the same sex, under the Bureau's previous policy, would have been counted as a single parent. Under the new policy, a spokesman for the Bureua told the New York Times, couples "ought to report the way they see themselves."