With the fight for same-sex marriage fully engaged throughout the country, and the realization that full marriage rights likely won't be won for many years (with the notable exception of Massachusetts), due in part to recent setbacks in courts in several states it's time to remind the community that we must neither scrap domestic partner benefits, nor should we become complacent and take domestic partner benefits for granted. Earlier this month, the Boston Globe sent a memo to its gay and lesbian employees stating that those based in Massachusetts need to marry by January 1 or else lose their domestic partner benefits.
For years, the left wing of the gay community has warned that we would lose our hard fought gains for all kinds of gay families as the arguments increasingly focused on marriage; with the Globe 's recent announcement, we see that those fears are materializing.
Marriage and domestic partner benefits are not an either-or proposition. We can and should have both. Over the years, domestic partner benefits have come to be understood to apply only to same-sex couples, but that wasn't the reason they were created. In Berkeley, the first municipality to adopt domestic partner benefits for its workers in 1987, the ordinance covered opposite-sex and same-sex couples. In fact, more opposite-sex couples are registered under the program in Berkeley than same-sex couples.
Domestic partnerships were created to protect families regardless of their marital status. San Francisco's domestic partner registry, for example, allows someone who is financially responsible for another to designate that person as a domestic partner, for purposes of the ordinance.
To use the domestic partner system to remedy gay marriage inequality may not actually be the best approach after all – at the state level we saw this last year when poor and disabled gays were told that they may have to dissolve their domestic partnerships or lose their Medicaid once marriage-like rights and responsibilities were added to AB205, leaving them with no alternative form of state partnership recognition. And we are seeing the same at the Globe and other Massachusetts companies where domestic partner benefits were only offered to same-sex couples as a way to redress marriage inequality – now that marriage is available, families that cannot or do not marry for whatever reason (a past undissolved marriage, a binational couple, a family that does not involve a romantic relationship) will lose their health insurance. Quite a shame, really, when you realize that the domestic partner system was created to avoid this kind of marital status discrimination.There is a backlash to the DP=gay marriage approach, as we have seen with many of the newer state constitutional amendments that now seek to ban not only gay marriage but domestic partnerships as well. Similar regulations in Missouri, Utah, Michigan, and Ohio have forced state universities and colleges to stop offering domestic partner benefits. Measures that had been planned for California this year sought to do the same thing; thankfully they did not quality for the ballot, but antigay marriage advocates promise to return.
In Arizona, activists have taken a unique approach to the brewing fight over the "Protect Marriage Arizona" amendment slated for the November ballot, by focusing their campaign on efforts to defeat marital status discrimination. The amendment would do far more than ban same-sex marriage in the Arizona Constitution – it also would outlaw all gay and straight domestic partnerships in the state. Families comprised of partners who are not legally married will lose medical benefits, hospital visitation, and other benefits if they work for the state, any Arizona city or town, or school district, according to Arizona Together, the group fighting the amendment. The group also notes that of the 118,196 Arizona households with unmarried partners identified in the 2000 census, about 12,000 of them were same-sex couples. Many seniors living in the state opt for domestic partnerships for fear of losing pension or other benefits. The amendment would put those arrangements in jeopardy.
We remain fully committed to marriage rights for same-sex couples, but we also are fully behind ending marital status discrimination, and that's where the fight for domestic partnerships is relevant. The time to fight for domestic partner benefits preservation for all families is now, and we must do so while we make a case for gay marriage, not take the tired "we'll come back for you later" approach.
Marriage can't win without more resources being expended on the fight to win and keep domestic partnerships, and retaining domestic partnership programs won't happen unless we insist they expand to cover more than same-sex couples. It is time to demand that when we speak of gay marriage, we continue to emphasize that "love makes a family," not that marriage is the only way possible to protect gay families.