It’s a deep-rooted belief in America that if you’re going to be with someone the rest of your life, or for a few months while you get to know each other (as is the case with so many celebrities), you might as well get married. For taxes, you know.

The U.S. Census Bureau released a report this year that indicates that maybe Americans are doing what they want to do and living how they want to live, regardless of tax breaks or other incentives. Based on its 2005 American Community Survey, just more than 50 percent of America’s households are headed by nontraditional couples, unmarried couples and single parents. I, for one, am thrilled that people are not all part of a picture-perfect nuclear family, partially because I am among this group of conscientious objectors to the confines of government-sanctioned living situations.

First of all, it must be acknowledged that some of these people do not want to live in nontraditional households.

Beyond them, I think this report shows that Americans are bucking tradition, and not buckling under societal pressure to get married. They are ignoring the government’s ploys to get people married and away from a life of sinfully unwedded bliss. There are also all those gays and lesbians the government is dead-set on preventing from getting married, whether they want to or not.

Our living situations are often a reflection of the region in which we live. The study showed that big cities, and the East and West Coasts in general, had the majority of the nontraditional households. The good old Midwest is still keeping with tradition and religion by waiting until marriage to move in together for the most part, according to the study.

Wherever the majority of the nontraditional couples live, it seems only natural to me that they and their influence will spread. And I couldn’t be happier. In this country where religion and Judeo-Christian morality is being written into our “secular” laws, it is so refreshing to see that people are still holding strong to the American ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And I will add that I’m glad to see that there are those who are still pursuing the American dream of a traditional, and hopefully loving, family.

Whether through television or White House press releases, we are being told constantly that homosexuality and having children out of wedlock and moving in with our significant others is bad. One of the loudest opponents of nontraditional households, George Bush, who said in a June 2006 press release in support of a constitutional ban on gay marriage, “The union of a man and woman in marriage is the most enduring and important human institution.”

But we know that gay marriage and other nontraditional ways of life don’t have to be bad or sinful. We know that our lives and living situations are what we make of them.

The face of America is changing. With every new generation we are moving toward a place where people live how they choose to – not as the government, or religion, or anyone else wants them to.

In this America of the future, there will be a newly married couple. And they will file their taxes with the same benefits as the married gay couple down the block whose children play with theirs. And this will all happen in Ohio, and Texas, and San Francisco. Someday.