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Why Not Domestic Partnerships or Civil Unions?
Several states grant protections to same-sex couples. Massachusetts grants marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Vermont and Connecticut grant civil union licenses to same-sex couples and California allows same-sex couples to register as domestic partners. New Jersey, Hawaii, the District of Columbia, and Maine grant more limited forms of protections to same-sex couples. None of these legal relationships provide full equality, and none is recognized by the federal government.
Only Marriage Provides Full Legal Equality
The word “marriage” is the gateway to the 1,138 federal protections afforded to married couples. Without that word, same-sex couples in civil unions or domestic partnerships have no claim for those legal protections. While those federal protections are presently withheld even from married same-sex couples, many in the LGBT community believe that this discrimination will not stand the test of time.
A marriage license provides protections that are crucial for families, including:
- Right to spousal health insurance benefits
- Access to family courts for dissolution of relationships
- Death benefits for surviving spouses of firefighters and police officers
- Mutual responsibility for debts
- The ability to sponsor a foreign-born partner for a green card
- Joint assessment of income for determining eligibility for state government assistance programs
- Child custody, visitation, and duties of financial support to children
- Right to inherit a spouse’s pension
- Entitlement to inherit social security and disability benefits upon the death of a spouse
- Ability to inherit jointly owned property without incurring tax penalties
- Right to file joint income taxes
- Ability to put a spouse on the deed to a home without incurring tax penalties
- Access to “family memberships”
- Domestic violence protections
- Immunity from testifying against a spouse
- Right to sue for wrongful death of a spouse
Registered Domestic Partnerships and Civil Unions May End at the State Line
While registered domestic partnerships in California, and civil unions in Connecticut and Vermont do provide many important state rights and protections, those protections often end at the state line. A California couple who are registered domestic partners may be legal strangers once they cross the California border into another state. They could still be denied even the most basic rights and protections, such as the right to visit each other in the hospital.
In contrast, married heterosexual spouses have all the same rights and protections when they travel to other states as they enjoy in their own state.
Domestic Partnerships and Civil Unions Are Separate and Unequal.
By creating a separate institution for same-sex couples, California is sending a negative message: it sets LGBT families apart and denies them access to the same status that is available to all other families.
In its opinion about the constitutionality of a civil union bill, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court stated:
“The bill’s absolute prohibition of the use of the word ‘marriage’ by ‘spouses’ who are the same sex is more than semantic. The dissimilitude between the terms ‘civil marriage’ and ‘civil union’ is not innocuous; it is a considered choice of language that reflects a demonstrable assigning of same-sex, largely homosexual, couples to second-class status. . . .
For no rational reason the marriage laws of the Commonwealth discriminate against a defined class; no amount of tinkering with language will eradicate that stain. The bill would have the effect of maintaining and fostering a stigma of exclusion that the Constitution prohibits. It would deny to same-sex ‘spouses’ only a status that is specially recognized in society and has significant social and other advantages.”
California Superior Court Judge Richard A. Kramer reached the same conclusion, explaining:
“The idea that marriage-like rights without marriage is adequate smacks of a concept long rejected by the courts: separate but equal. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. . . . the Court recognized that the provision of separate but equal educational opportunities to racial minorities ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’ Such logic is equally applicable to the State’s structure granting substantial marriage rights but no marriage . . .
An Example of the Inequality:
Corey Davis and Andre LeJeune, a Black same-sex couple, are plaintiffs in Woo v. California. Corey and Andre have been together for over 8 years and provide an example of how health care and legal marriage are inextricably linked:
Because Corey is HIV-positive, the couple is particularly concerned about their ability to take care of each other in times of crisis. Hospitalizations and traveling continues to remind them of the legal vulnerability of their relationship. They worry about being able to visit each other in the hospital as well as being able to make important decisions for each other if something should happen.
Corey and Andre also wish to have the public validation that comes with marriage. “Just by being married,” Corey says, “in other people’s minds and in our own there is some glue that helps to hold you together.
No matter how confident we are in our relationship, it is important to have other people validate it. Without being married, no matter how long we have been together, people assume that our relationship is tenuous. Even though people have known us together as a couple for six years, when we told people that we were getting married they started taking our relationship much more seriously.”
Corey continues, “growing up as a Black male in this society, I have received too often that message of exclusion, or of judgment by others to be ‘less than,’ when they don’t know me at all. It is no less painful, nor more tolerable, to receive that message because my beloved is a man, than when it is because of my African heritage. And the fact that it comes from the very government to which I pay taxes and give my loyalty, only makes it worse.”
Willie Brown
What are the costs to society by not allowing same sex couples to marry?
By creating a legal—and, subsequently, a social and economic—barrier between one segment of the society and the rest of us, we create all sorts of resentments, hardships and pathologies. Most fundamentally, we propagate an unjust society, which exacts untold costs for generations.
How does this fit into your religious views?
My vision of the supreme-being is a God who loves all his children. My God would not separate one segment of the population and subject it to discrimination, ridicule or unequal status; that's something human beings do, not the good Lord.
Willie Brown, Former Mayor of San Francisco
Domestic Partnerships and Civil Unions Create a Legal Quagmire
By creating a separate institution rather than permitting the couples to marry, California has created a legal quagmire. For example, California registered domestic partners may not know if they are entitled to certain aid programs and other government benefits because their relationship is recognized by the state but not by the federal government. Couples also have to face complicated and unanswered questions about how to file their state and federal taxes.
Domestic Partnerships and Civil Unions Create a Burden on Businesses
By creating a separate status, the California government and California businesses have to spend large amounts of money to amend forms and computer programs, as well as to train their employees about the change in law and what it means to be a registered domestic partner. If California simply permitted same-sex couples to marry, businesses would not have to take these extra steps.
Marriage Is More than the Sum of its Parts
Because it is a social, cultural and legal institution, access to marriage provides protections to the married family on many levels. The word "marriage" is itself a protection because others understand that when you are married you are part of a family. For some, being married allows them to express externally the nature of the commitment they feel internally. Marriages receive widespread respect that domestic partnerships and civil unions do not.
