Marriage Discrimination: Particularly Harmful to Black Families
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Marriage Discrimination: Particularly Harmful to Black Families
“Like with most civil injustices, marriage inequality falls particularly hard on those living on the margins: the poor, less educated, immigrants, the elderly, the ill, and those otherwise most vulnerable.” – Evan Wolfson, Executive Director, Freedom to Marry
A landmark study of African-American lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in the U.S., Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud, released in March 2002 by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, found that ending the exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage would provide especially significant protections to LGBT people of color.
The median annual income level for Black same-sex couples who are raising children hovers around $40,000. This is less than their white gay and lesbian counterparts.
The inability to marry creates significant problems with:
- Coping financially after the death of a partner. Even the lowest wage workers, if legally employed, pay to support the Social Security system. Unmarried partners, though, cannot receive the Social Security survivor benefits that married partners do, and may therefore be left without any means of supporting themselves.
- Accessing healthcare. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS), one in five African Americans (20%) lacked health insurance, based on a three-year average from 1998 through 2000. Allowing same-sex couples to marry would extend Medicare and Medicaid spousal benefits and would allow for the tax-free provision of benefits by an employer to the same-sex partner of an employee.
- Accessing veterans’ and military medical care benefits for partners. Twenty-one percent (21%) of men and ten percent (10%) of women in Black same-sex couples are military veterans who served bravely in our countries armed forces, despite threats of discharge under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
- Receiving governmental support. Married, heterosexual couple-led families should not be favored over other types of families in determining eligibility for any government-funded service, including welfare benefits and limited supply benefits such as Head Start slots, student financial aid, public housing, or job training.
- Securing housing benefits. Same-sex couples do not receive the protections of joint rental leases with automatic renewal rights. In highly competitive public housing slots, families can lose their homes. Only fifty-seven percent (57%) of Black male same-sex couples and fifty-five percent (55%) of Black female same-sex couples own their own home.
- Dealing with medical emergencies. Living wills and powers of attorney are intricate and expensive legal documents to draft, and don’t solve most problems. While registered domestic partnerships eliminate the problems that lacking these crucial legal tools present in California, they do not eliminate the need for these extra protections when same-sex couples travel or move to another state.
Jewelle Gomez, a Black woman, and her partner Diane Sabin have lived together for over 14 years in the Glen Park area of San Francisco.
Over the course of their relationship, there have been many instances when Jewelle and Diane were treated unfairly because they were not married. They paid an attorney several thousand dollars to create a durable power of attorney for health and finances, trusts, and other documents to ensure basic protections to take care of each other. “We always remember,” Jewelle says, “that even with these documents, there are many rights and protections of married couples that we cannot replicate, even with the help of attorneys. We can never create a sufficient amount of paper work to cover all of the possibilities.”
For example, in preparing for retirement, neither Jewelle nor Diane can designate the other to receive social security survivor benefits in the event of one of their deaths. This is just one of the many rights and financial protections that Jewelle and Diane will never have without a legal marriage, even though they are domestic partners.
Jewelle and Diane are also acutely aware that there is no guarantee that their limited rights and responsibilities as domestic partners will be respected during their frequent travels to other states. Their fears are “compounded by the many stories of women we knew who were denied access to their own homes, or even the funerals of their long-time lesbian partners by the partner’s biological family.” Only marriage equality will enable same-sex couples to enjoy the same peace of mind and security that married heterosexual couples now enjoy.
Kevin Murray
Sen. Kevin Murray, D-Culver City, contended the bill would not undermine Proposition 22, which passed with 61 percent of the vote, but would clarify the obligations and responsibilities of domestic partners.
"This is a simple way for two people, who whether you like it or not, have a family and are raising children, to manage their family to the best of their abilities," Murray said, according to AP.
- Kevin Murray in response to bill AB 205 granting rights of domestic partnerships in California. It grants “virtual” marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34327
Senator in California State Assembly
