Roll Call headlined this story “Greater Insurance Regulation Sought: Some Say Obama’s Plan Doesn’t Do Enough.” It seemed fishy though, that the groups ostensibly looking for more regulation are the insurance and banking industries’ lobbying arms, including the American Insurance Association and the Financial Services Roundtable.

And sure enough, if you get down a few paragraphs in the story, what the groups are actually seeking is not more regulation, but the ability to avoid state regulations that they don’t like:

Groups like the American Insurance Association, the Financial Services Roundtable, and the American Council of Life Insurers support the White House’s efforts to create a national insurance infrastructure but are also pushing for the creation of an optional federal charter that would allow insurance companies to choose whether to follow state or federal rules.

Just like the Mortgage Bankers Association wants to avoid regulation of mortgage lending at the state level, insurance companies want to avoid state regulations when it suits their interest. Allowing insurance companies to opt out of state regulation — which is what an optional federal charter would do — would enable them to “shop for the lightest regulation,” which could be worth billions of dollars to the insurance industry.

Thus far, the Obama administration has been very conscious of ensuring that federal regulation doesn’t preempt state law, and acknowledging that states have a good grasp on what their regulatory needs are. Allowing an optional federal charter would fly in the face of that approach. As Charles Symington of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America’s said, “in many respects the battle over the optional federal charter has been between Main Street and Wall Street. The administration appears to have initially decided that the arguments are on the side of Main Street America, small business and consumers.”

Someone should tell Roll Call that looking for different regulation is not the same as looking for more regulation.

Our guest blogger, Gary J. Gates, PhD is the Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law and author of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas.

We welcome the good news that the US Census Bureau has announced it will publicly release counts of same-sex married couples identified in Census 2010. In Census 2000, the Bureau altered the responses of same-sex husbands and wives, counting them instead as “unmarried partners.” With marriage equality now established in six states and an estimated 35,000 same-sex couples already legally married in the US, this decision seems like a no-brainer. But the change in policy has important ramifications for researchers (like me), policy-makers, and the LGBT community.

Census same-sex couple data have been critically important in undermining pernicious stereotypes and myths about the LGBT community. For example:

– Many believe that gay people only live in large urban areas and in neighborhoods like the Castro in San Francisco and Chelsea in New York. Census 2000 found same-sex couples living in 99% of US counties.

– Few people think of LGBT people as parents, yet a quarter of same-sex couples are raising children. Among couples that include a non-white partner, childrearing is substantially higher.

– Despite the military’s “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” policy making gay and lesbian servicemembers invisible, Census same-sex couple data were critical in estimating that 65,000 LGB men and women are serving in the US military.

As more same-sex couples marry and the marriage equality debate continues, Census data that allow us to distinguish between same-sex spouses and those who use the term “unmarried partner” can be similarly important. A recent paper I published in Demography compared traits of same-sex couples who registered as domestic partners in California (the state didn’t have marriage when the survey was taken) to non-registered same-sex couples. The differences were very similar to those we observe between married and unmarried heterosexual couples. It may be that, demographically, same-sex married couples look quite a bit like their different-sex married counterparts. Such a finding undermines arguments that same-sex couples are just fundamentally different.

But these data can be useful beyond LGBT issues. Marriage plays a role in tax policy, health care insurance provision, and access to federal poverty programs. More accurate data means all of these policy debates can be better informed with facts, not myths and stereotypes.

Of course, counting same-sex spouses is also just the right thing to do. An accurate decennial Census is critical to our representative democracy. With the recent California Supreme Court ruling upholding Prop. 8, LGBT Americans are a bit extra-sensitive these days around issues of public recognition of same-sex relationships. Counting same-sex spouses assures the LGBT community that the Census respects their families and makes it more likely that they will contribute to a good Census tally. It also comports with the Bureau’s well deserved reputation for quality and accuracy.

Today, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) appeared on CNBC to provide his thoughts on, among other things, the consumer protection agency that the Obama administration wants to create as part of its financial regulation package. Like the banking lobby, the Chamber of Commerce, and some conservatives in Congress, Bond is opposed to creating the agency. However, his reasoning seems to be that, in his personal experience, banks actually provide “too much information” to consumers:

I think, really, the idea to have a consumer protection regulator, in addition to a banking regulator, is a bad idea…We bought a bunch of houses in recent years. My wife likes to move. And each year, each time we go through this, you get these stacks of paper. You get too much information. It is not consumer information, and that is part of the problem.

Watch it:

So, Sen. Bond, how many houses do you own? But more importantly, isn’t the fact that mortgage contracts are getting larger and more complex an argument for the creation of a consumer protection agency? It would seem that the overabundance of material would make it more likely that a consumer gets unwittingly ripped off.

As David Lazarus wrote in the Los Angeles Times, the real problem here is that banks “have consistently proved themselves unworthy of customers’ trust“:

From runaway credit card interest rates to mortgages that turn into one-way trips to foreclosure, lenders have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to deal with customers fairly and responsibly. Instead, they place their own interests ahead of all other considerations, and in so doing expose frequently unsophisticated consumers to enormous risk and financial ruin.

There are a lot of ways to get lost in the forest of subprime mortgages, reverse mortgages, and other complex financial instruments, even without taking into account the banks’ active predatory actions. Bond wants to have bank regulators also regulate products on the ground level, but those regulators have already demonstrated that they operate at 30,000 feet, watching over the soundness of an institution overall (and not even doing a good job with that), but not the financial safety of consumers. I think it’s asking too much to have them policing both an institution’s health and the way in which that institution interacts with consumers.

But at least Bond didn’t join the rest of the CNBC crew in claiming that only “suckers” and “idiots” are victims of predatory lending.