Charles E. Moritz was a traveling salesman who lived with his eighty-nine-year-old mother in Denver. Moritz paid someone to care for her when he was on the road, but his troubles began when he tried to take a tax deduction. The IRS only granted such deductions to women, widowers, or the husbands of incapacitated women, and Moritz was a never-married man. The idea that a man on his own might be responsible somehow for caregiving apparently never crossed the government’s mind. With a wide grin, RBG said, “Let’s take it.”
