Commentary: "Thinking About a Same-Sex Marriage in California"

Link: New York Times
by Kim Severson

Excerpt:
As soon as the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that gay men and lesbians had a constitutional right to marry, my partner and I started getting the calls: When would we head West to get hitched?

In the euphoric wake of the decision, it sure seemed like a great idea. Unlike Massachusetts, where a couple has to declare an intention to live in the state, California has no residency requirement. Plus, we have a lot of family there.

But do we really need to go to California?

Although our relationship isn’t legally sanctioned, we had a commitment ceremony with a great caterer and a flower girl and weeping parents.

And we have been carefully building a marriage inside our filing cabinet. There, we have a New York City domestic partnership certificate and the papers for the house and everything else we own together. We have wills, powers of attorney and medical directives. We also have the attorneys’ bills. The tab is close to $10,000.

[...]

I wondered, would we be treated as a married couple once we came back to New York? I called Susan Sommer, senior counsel at Lambda Legal, a gay rights advocacy group. The good news, she told me, is that because of recent court decisions, a marriage between two women in California would be, at least technically, recognized in New York.

“New York has very strong principles of law that say if you enter into a valid marriage in another jurisdiction, that marriage will be respected with very narrow exceptions,” she said.

But she cautioned, “There haven’t been many situations where it has been tested in the courts.” So, she added, “A couple that is coming back married to New York is going to likely have to be pioneers on some of these frontiers.”

I have an infant at home and a full-time job. Do I have time to be a pioneer? Do I want to end up as a legal test case for trying to exercise the same rights that a married heterosexual person enjoys?

To help figure out what else I would be fighting for, I turned to “1,324 Reasons for Marriage Equality in New York State,” a publication of the Empire State Pride Agenda Foundation and the New York City Bar Association. The number refers to the legal rights and duties New York statutes and regulations confer on married individuals.

Aside from the big ones, like being able to make medical decisions and inherit each other’s property, the rights of married people in New York include being able to borrow money at better rates and, if in need of public assistance, to get more than single people. If I am in prison and she dies, I can go to her funeral. We can also commit each other to mental wards.

But getting married in California won’t mean that she will get my Social Security benefits, or that we won’t have to pay extra taxes for her to use my domestic partner health benefits. The federal government doesn’t really care what California or New York thinks about our marital status. Nor do most states; 41 prohibit same-sex marriage.

So why bother adding another piece of paper to the file, especially with talk of a referendum in California to overturn the court decision?

Evan Wolfson, executive director of the national group Freedom to Marry, took me to task.“What you are doing is not just getting a piece of paper, you are getting married and you are as married as just about anybody on the planet,” he said. “That’s how we need to talk about it and understand it ourselves.”

It’s a patchwork application, he conceded, but it is the best we have. “Getting married in California doesn’t solve your day-to-day problems but that’s what civil rights looks like,” he said.

At the end of it all, I was exhausted. And although I started out not so interested in getting married in California, I ended up shopping for plane tickets.

[jw]