At 04:25 PM 03/23/2000 -0600, "Bob" used up his slack and wrote:
>I never received the census letter. I would also like to not be interviewed
>in any way when a census taker approaches my door. How can I accomplish that?
>What is the most safest legal way for me?
There's a Fifth Amendment. There's a Miranda Warning.
Is the low-paid census worker going to Mirandize you,
and offer to provide a lawyer while you're asked the questions?
You'll blow their mind - they'll just mark you down as "white" and go away.
There's a paper form asking you lots of questions that might be incriminating,
even on the short version.
For instance - who's living at your house, and are they related to you?
In many towns, this is a legal issue, either because of tenant laws
trying to control landlordism or trying to prevent summer tourist rentals,
or anti-cohabitation laws trying to keep people from living in sin,
or marriage laws limiting you to one spouse of the opposite sex
(and yes, the census form asked your sex), or child custody laws,
or laws about how many bedrooms you have depending on the number
and gender of your kids, or other interferences with your personal life that
it would never occur to you that the government might be rude enough to ask,
much less regulate.
I don't know what all the questions on the long version of the form are;
how many toilets or telephones or TVs or cats or Cocacola drinkers,
how much you make or what countries you bank in or whatever.
And there's a lot more information that can be correlated.
And there are questions that might not be incriminating now,
but the laws might change, and if they knew you were living with
your two spouses last year and they pass a law "Defending Marriage" next year,
then they may go look you up and see if you're still together.
Or maybe the INS changes the definitions on legal marriage for immigrants,
and they want to see if your Taiwanese wife really lives with you
now that she's finished college, or gets upset that you and your
spouse have different last names (just because your culture doesn't
have the woman change her name when getting married.)
The Census bureau provides lots of detailed summaries of information,
so even if they don't publish your name, but you're the only
Guatemalan-Taiwanese 35-year-old couple on your block, they know who you are,
especially if one of you has a green card.
But the rules against publishing real details aren't cast in stone -
Congress made them, and Congress can change them any time they like,
and under the Buchanan Administration they probably will,
during the War On Something.
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
