Planners look at asking if you're gay, straight or in between
5:00AM Friday July 18, 2008
By Simon Collins
Government statisticians are inching towards asking New Zealanders about their sexual orientation, but probably not before the census after next.
After 12 years of agitation by gay activists, Statistics NZ has published a paper acknowledging for the first time "emerging interest" in sexual orientation and behaviour.
A former editor of the gay newspaper Express, Victor van Wetering, has asked the Office of Human Rights Proceedings to take a legal case against the department on the grounds that not including a question about it in the census is illegal discrimination.
Census forms already let people describe another person in their household as their "same-sex partner" - a category that almost doubled from 3255 couples in the 1996 census to 6171 in 2006.
But census-takers here and in Australia, the US, Canada and Britain have all shied away from asking people whether they are heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.
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