Government's Cupid
The Case for the Partnership Act
The first time I called Stu Patter to set up an interview, he thought I was a prank caller. I had him call my desk number at Daily Post Magazine to verify that I wasn't joking when I said I wanted to interview him for a neutral, unbiased article about the Partnership Act.
"I've done interviews before, mind you," he explained to me, "but it's been years since the last one. It seems everyone just wants to forget about the Partnership Act."
Stuart Patter, the seventy year old former Yale Law School professor and retired Director of the now-defunct Bureau of Partnership, lives in a comfortable suburban neighborhood in Reston, Virginia, about thirty miles outside Washington, D.C. "I just had to get outside the Beltway after I resigned,” he says in a tone of world weariness. "I'm really much more a man of the people than most people would think."
Stu was an amiable interlocutor, well-spoken and charming. As soon as his wife (a pre-Partnership Act find, he tells me without a hint of irony) returned with a glass of white wine for each of us, he launched into his account of the Partnership Act.
To hear Patter tell it, the Partnership Act of 2019 was a good-faith effort to solve one of mankind's biggest ongoing problems. "You can look at the public health numbers yourself," he insisted.
"Single people comprise 43 percent of the adult population of the United States. Single people commit more crimes, kill themselves
Warming to the subject, Patter fell into the pitch that now sounds so familiar to us. “If you said 43 percent of the country was suffering from a curable disease that ruins lives and imposes a huge cost on the economy, everyone would agree that distributing the cure to that disease should be the country’s highest priority. The only reason people hesitated to cure the disease of single people is that there’s an outdated Western cultural taboo of individualism, of invincible lone cowboy types who can do everything themselves, including finding their own mate through dating.”