Gay rights group tallies rights, regs related to marriage

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

The Empire State Pride Agenda, which is working the corridors of the Capitol in Albany tallying votes in support of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s marriage equality bill, has also been tabulating numbers of a different sort.

In a report issued Tuesday, “1,324 Reasons for Marriage Equality in New York State,” the Pride Agenda Foundation, in tandem with the New York City Bar Association, itemizes the 1,324 instances in which state law and regulation make reference to civil marriage, legal spouse, or surviving legal spouse. In sum, those references define the parameters of the rights, benefits, obligations, responsibilities and constraints offered to those entering into civil marriage under state law.

The analysis is directly comparable to a 1997 study, updated in 2004, in which the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, identified 1,138 separate references in federal law and regulation to marriage and spouse.

A relatively small number of the 1,324 references at the state level involve the sorts of concrete issues that animate the drive for marriage equality: the right to Workers’ Compensation survivor benefits; the guarantee that a child born, even through artificial insemination, shall be deemed the child of both parents; the ability to hold onto property jointly owned without fear of inheritance taxes in the event of one spouse’s death; protection from being compelled to testify in court about communications within a marriage; the right to be treated like any other married couple both in the provision of government services and benefits and in access to public accommodations and any contractual benefits in the workplace.

Other rights are far more arcane, but could prove significant in the lives of any given couple. Widowed spouses of veterans have the right to priority in public housing accommodations, for example, while the spouse of a service member in New York has the right to attend community college at the same cost as state residents.

Numerous other provisions of state law define obligations or constraints. The spouse of one of the highest paid officers in a bank cannot serve on its board of trustees, for example. Or, an individual applying for a liquor license can be asked if their spouse was ever convicted of a crime.

The report takes note of the fact that in the past several years, the state has taken a small number of incremental steps to provide benefits to same-sex domestic partners, including the right to hospital visitation and control of a deceased partner’s remains. State and city government offer the partners of their employees health benefits, and since 1989, gay men and lesbians in New York City have had the right to succeed their late partners as tenants in rent-controlled and rent-stabilized apartments. The state and city pension plans and the state health insurance program which serves many municipalities and school boards all recognize out-of-state gay and lesbian marriages.

But, the Pride Agenda emphasizes, this progress represents a drop in the bucket. And the legal avenues couples are pursuing to protect their unions and each other—through wills, health care proxies, powers of attorney, and the like—can never deliver a state-defined benefit such as Workers’ Compensation.

Coming just one week after the New York City comptroller’s office issued a report finding a nearly $400 million dollar economic and fiscal advantage to marriage equality in its first three years statewide, the Pride Agenda-Bar Association report further quantifies the scope and implications of a social justice advance typically argued on grounds of equality and family protection. For legislators weighing whether to gradually expand the rights of gay and lesbian families piecemeal, or simply bite the bullet on marriage equality, the price of incrementalism suggested by this report may just strike some as daunting.

The Pride Agenda and the LGBT Rights Committee of the City Bar Association gave credit to the law firm of Proskauer Rose LLP, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the New York Civil Liberties Union for their contributions to the report.