The Unintended Tax Advantages of Gay Marriage

Theodore P. Seto, The Unintended Tax Advantages of Gay Marriage, 65 Washington and Lee Law Review 1529 (2008): "The Article concludes that the only way to ensure that gay couples will be
taxed no more favorably than heterosexual married couples is to list gay marriage as one of the proxy relationships that automatically invokes pertinent anti-abuse rules—in other words, to treat gay marriage as marriage for federal income tax purposes. In the absence of an attractive formal status that then invokes related-party anti-abuse rules, well-advised gay couples are, and will
continue to be, permitted to pay systematically lower federal income taxes than heterosexual married couples—a result unlikely to be acceptable to a majority of Americans in the long run."