Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I'm disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don't recognize. You got married, congratulations! But why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity? And if family unity is so important, why don't men ever change their names?

On one level, I get it: people are really hard on married women who don't change their names. Ten percent of the American public still thinks that keeping your name means you aren't dedicated to your marriage. And a full 50% of Americans think you should be legally required to take your husband's name. Somewhere upwards of 90% of women do change their names when they get married. I understand, given the social judgment of a sexist culture, why some women would decide that a name change is the path of least resistance.

But that's not what you usually hear. Instead, the defense of the name change is something like, "We want our family to share a name" or "His last name was better" or "My last name was just my dad's anyway" – all reasons that make no sense. If your last name is really your dad's, then no one, including your dad, has a last name that's actually theirs.

It may be the case that in your marriage, he did have a better last name. But if that's really a gender-neutral reason for a name change, you'd think that men with unfortunate last names would change theirs as often as women do. Given that men almost never change their names upon marriage, either there's something weird going on where it just so happens that women got all of the bad last names, or "I changed my name because his is better" is just a convenient and ultimately unconvincing excuse.

Not that I'm unsympathetic to the women out there who have difficult or unfortunate last names. My last name is "Filipovic." People can't spell it or pronounce it, which is a liability when your job includes writing articles under your difficult-to-spell last name, and occasionally doing television or radio hits where the host cannot figure out what to call you. It's weird, and it's "ethnic," and it makes me way too easily Google-able. But Jill Filipovic is my name and my identity. Jill Smith is a different person.

That is fundamentally why I oppose changing your name (and why I look forward to the wider legalization of same-sex marriage, which in addition to just being good and right, will challenge the idea that there are naturally different roles for men and women within the marital unit). Identities matter, and the words we put on things are part of how we make them real. There's a power in naming that feminists and social justice activists have long highlighted. Putting a word to the most obvious social dynamics is the first step toward ending inequality. Words like "sexism" and "racism" make clear that different treatment based on sex or race is something other than the natural state of things; the invention of the term "Ms" shed light on the fact that men simply existed in the world while women were identified based on their marital status.

Your name is your identity. The term for you is what situates you in the world. The cultural assumption that women will change their names upon marriage – the assumption that we'll even think about it, and be in a position where we make a "choice" of whether to keep our names or take our husbands' – cannot be without consequence. Part of how our brains function and make sense of a vast and confusing universe is by naming and categorizing. When women see our names as temporary or not really ours, and when we understand that part of being a woman is subsuming your own identity into our husband's, that impacts our perception of ourselves and our role in the world. It lessens the belief that our existence is valuable unto itself, and that as individuals we are already whole. It disassociates us from ourselves, and feeds into a female understanding of self as relational – we are not simply who we are, we are defined by our role as someone's wife or mother or daughter or sister.

Men rarely define themselves relationally. And men don't tend to change their names, or even let the thought cross their mind. Men, too, seem to realize that changing one's name has personal and professional consequences. In the internet age, all the work you did under your previous name isn't going to show up in a Google search. A name change means a new driver's license, passport, professional documentation, the works. It means someone trying to track you down – a former client, an old classmate, a co-worker from a few years back with an opportunity you may be interested in – is going to have a tough time finding you. It means lost opportunities personally and professionally.

Of course, there's also power in a name change. Changing your name if, for example, you change your gender presentation makes sense – a new, more authentic name to match the new, more authentic you. But outside of the gender transition context, marriage has long meant a woman giving up her identity, and along with it, her basic rights. Under coverture laws, a woman's legal existence was merged with her husband's: "husband and wife are one," and the one was the husband. Married women had no right to own property or enter into legal contracts. It's only very recently that married women could get their own credit cards. Marital rape remained legal in many states through the 1980s. The idea that a woman retains her own separate identity from her husband, and that a husband doesn't have virtually unlimited power over a woman he marries, is a very new one.

Fortunately, feminists succeeded in shifting the law and the culture of marriage. Today marriages are typically based on love instead of economics. Even conservative couples who still believe a husband should be the head of the household have more egalitarian marriages than previous generations, and are less likely than their parents or grandparents to see things like domestic violence as a private matter or a normal part family life.

Unfortunately, despite all of these gains, the marital name change remains. Even the small number of women who do keep their names after marriage tend to give their children the husband's name. At best there's hyphenation. That's a fair solution, but after many centuries of servitude and inequality, allow me to suggest some gender push-back: Give the kids the woman's last name.

Allow me to suggest an even stronger push: If it's important to you that your family all share a last name, make it the wife's. Yes, men, that means taking your wife's name. Or do what this guy did and invent a new name with your wife. And women, if the man you're set to marry extols the virtues of sharing a family name but won't consider taking yours? Perhaps ask yourself if you should be marrying someone who thinks your identity is fundamentally inferior to his own.

The suggestion that men change their names may sound unfair given everything I just wrote about the value of your name and identity, and the psychological impact of growing up in a world where your own name for yourself is impermanent. But men don't grow up with that sense of psychological impermanence. They don't grow up under the shadow of several thousand years of gender-based discrimination. So if you'd rather your family all shared a name, it actually makes much more sense to make it the woman's. Or we can embrace a modern vision of family where individuals form social and legal bonds out of love and loyalty, instead of defining family as a group coalesced under one male figurehead and a singular name.

At the very least, everyone keeping their own name will make Facebook less confusing.

A video posted to YouTube back in November 2012 is starting to go viral after Mashable posted it to its site on Saturday.

We all know there is a huge gap between the rich and the poor in the United States, but this video visually captivates viewers by showing just how much of the country's wealth lies in the hands of the top 20 percent.

The Associated Press’ Stephen Ohlemacher is out with an article lamenting the tax burden levied on the richest Americans who are “paying some of their biggest federal tax bills in decades even as the rest of the population continues to pay at historically low rates.”

The piece, which seeks to contextualize the political debate surrounding the deficit in economic data, devotes its first eight paragraphs to “the poor rich,” characterizing the current tax structure as a great burden on higher income Americans. It’s not until paragraph 16 that Ohlemacher departs from the article’s opening premise to mention that the income gap between the rich and everyone else has exploded, helping to create the difference in tax rates.

Ohlemacher kicks off his article about the “new analysis” from the Tax Policy Center by lamenting that “families with incomes in the top 20 percent of the nation will pay an average of 27.2 percent of their income in federal taxes,” while “The average family in the bottom 20 percent of households won’t pay any federal taxes” and can claim “more in credits than they owe in taxes.”

A quote from a fellow at the Center, which is described as a nonpartisan “research organization,” succinctly sums up the problem: “My sense is that high-income people feel abused by being targeted always for more taxes,” Roberton Williams tells Ohlemacher. “You can understand why they feel that way.”

To learn if middle class families feel “abused” in the current economy or why high income families pay as much as they do, the reader must skip past seven full paragraphs of political context about President Obama calling on Congress to close a “bunch of tax loopholes that are benefiting the well-off and the well-connected” (an idea that sounds absurd in light of the already unbearable tax burden), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rejecting that premise, and Democrats proposing a tax on “people making more than $1 million” to replace the sequester.

In paragraph 24, Ohlemacher finally presents a reason for the higher tax rates — though even this is delivered as an opinion from “Liberals and Democrats” and is not accorded the factual tone of Williams’ observation that the rich feel “abused.”

“Liberals and many Democrats say rich families can afford to pay higher taxes because their incomes have grown much more than incomes for middle- and low-income families,” Ohlemacher writes, quoting CBO data showing that “after-tax incomes for the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 to 2009, increasing by 155 percent,” while “incomes for those in the middle increased by just 32 percent during the same period.”

The author then consults Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who, he points out is employed by “a liberal think tank.” Marr finally explains that higher taxes on the rich are the result of “three decades in the United States where we had a tremendous increase in inequality” and tells Ohlemacher that this “disparity in income is a big reason why tax bills for the rich are approaching 30-year highs. As the rich get richer, a greater share of their income is taxed at the top rate, he said.”

It’s almost as though the author is upset to learn of this simple explanation, for he immediately follows it up with a quote from a representative from the Heritage Foundation, who predictably argues that “raising taxes again on the wealthy would reduce their incentive to save and invest, hurting long-term economic growth.”

With that, the conventional wisdom is restored and Ohlemacher can tell his readers that raising revenue is a liberal solution that will hurt the rich, while tough spending cuts to entitlements and discretionary programs are necessary to stabilize the national debt.

Once upon a time, “homeland” was a word of little significance in the American context.  What American before 9/11 would have called the United States his or her “homeland” rather than “country”?  Who sang “My homeland, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty”?  Between my birth in 1944, as World War II was drawing to a close, and September 11, 2001, I doubt I ever heard the word in reference to the U.S.

There was a reason: “homeland” had a certain ring to it and anyone would have known at once just what that ring, that resonance, was.  Not to put too fine a point on it, we’re talking about the ring of evil.  It sounded like the sort of word the Nazis or maybe Stalin would have used as the terrible totalitarians of the previous century mobilized their people for horrific wars and heinous crimes.

It’s true that, in the run-up to September 11th, somewhere in the corridors of Washington, there were right-wingers already pushing to homeland-ize this country.  The word, along with the idea of creating a future Office of Homeland Security, was then gestating like the monster baby in the movie Alien, awaiting its moment to burst forth.

Today, there’s nothing alien about that most un-American of terms.  It has slipped so smoothly into our lives that “Homeland” is the name of a popular TV show, and college students looking for a good livelihood can now get a BA or an MA coast to coast in... yep, homeland security.  (“You can build a career helping to protect our nation by earning your Bachelor of Science Degree in Homeland and Corporate Security at St. John’s University.”)  And if you happen to be into securing the homeland, you can even join the “corporate and homeland security club” on campus.  After college, given the money pouring into the “field,” the sky’s the limit.

Perhaps Booz Allen will hire you to consult for firms on -- you guessed it -- homeland security. (“Booz Allen is able to serve the Department of Homeland Security and our other clients because we make their mission our mission. We therefore understand what is needed to react quickly to rapidly changing events.”)  Or perhaps you’ll be taken on by the Homeland Security Research Corporation in Washington to provide “premium market, technology, and industry expertise that enables our global clients to gain critical insight into the business opportunities that exist within the Homeland Security & Homeland Defense market. Government clients include the US, UK, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden, Finland, and Singapore. US Congress, DHS, US Army, US Navy, DOD, DOT, GAO, NATO, and the EU are among others. HSRC serves over 600 private sector clients, including all major defense contractors and many Fortune 500 companies.”

Or what about the Chertoff Group, headed by Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, or the Ashcroft Group, headed by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, or for that matter Good Harbor Security Management, led by former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke.

And that only scratches the surface.  By 2006, only three years after the Department of Homeland Security had been set up, the New York Times was already reporting that “at least 90 officials” who worked there or at the White House office that preceded it had zipped through the revolving door into the private sector and were “executives, consultants, or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars' worth of domestic security business.”

What makes all of this remarkable is how quietly, how easily, how securely that most alien of words and the organization that goes with it have entered American life (and changed it).  Which is why, thanks to Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman from the invaluable National Priorities Project, TomDispatch.com is doing something rare these days: putting a spotlight on that modern cash cow and giant boondoggle lurking in the shadows of our world, the Department of Homeland Security.