And so is next week, and the week after …

In other words: sorry we missed it! (Again!) But now that folks who are “anything but married” (actually, it’s now called the National Unmarried and Single Americans Week) comprise the majority of households, hey, it’s your year.

(Now somebody tell the folks in charge.  From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“There’s a very heavy focus on marriage as a public-policy matter,”  said Nancy Polikoff, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. “You have it in the Bush administration’s policies that spend three-quarters of a billion dollars to promote marriage, and a really widespread campaign to convince the country that the decline of lifelong heterosexual marriage is responsible for all our social problems.”

She says  there’s a need to define family in a more expansive way, so that close family-like relationships are also defined by affinity or blood, not just by marriage. Such a change would allow people to take family or medical leave or paid sick days to care for family members “however they define them,” she says.

Nicky Grist, executive director of the decade-old New York nonprofit Alternatives to Marriage, says a broader definition of family than “the floor” currently used by the federal Family and Medical Leave Act “would make for a more just system, not a more abused system.”

Unmarried.org, as her group appears on the Web, is most concerned with health insurance access. The United States is “the only country that relies on marital status for access to health care,” says Grist.)