Marriage ruling due tomorrow

I received a call from the state office of the courts today, alerting me that the state Supreme Court is slated to rule tomorrow — Chief Justice Deborah Poritz’s final on the bench — on the long-awaited gay-marriage case.

And a Dayton couple (pictured) will be waiting with baited breath because their future could depend on it.

Here is what they told us earlier this year:

For 42-year-old Sarah and 46-year-old Suyin, marriage is as much about protecting their children as it is a symbol of their love and devotion.

“Your family is really the center of your existence,” Suyin said. “You work, you go to school, you’ve done all the right things. But there’s something else you can’t control.”

And that sums up pretty well what’s at stake for all gay couples in New Jersey.

Here is my column from February on the subject:

The state Supreme Court now has the chance to grant New Jersey’s gay and lesbian couples the rights they deserve.

The court heard arguments Wednesday on a case brought by seven couples — including Suyin and Sarah Lael of Dayton — challenging the state’s prohibition against gay marriage.

The five lesbian and two gay male couples who have brought the suit say the prohibition violates the state’s constitution and results in discrimination against gay and lesbian couples, in particular when it comes to health insurance, family leave and other perks that the married world takes for granted.

“For married couples,” writes Alfred P. Doblin, editorial page editor of the Herald News in Passaic County, “there is no fear that, after the death of a spouse, the
surviving partner would be denied Social Security benefits, pensions, access to health care coverage or saddled with estate taxes. For same-sex couples, there is no continuation of medical benefits, no Social Security, no guarantee of pensions, and, until recently, no assurance that a surviving partner could even have the final say on funeral arrangements.”

It is why the marriage issue has become so important in the gay community. It is a civil rights issue, a question of whether we as a society are willing to grant gay and lesbian couples full participation.

There are about 1,100 federal and state civil rights that go with being married; the legal construct controls issues ranging from inheritance, health insurance and Social Security to child-custody issues and end-of-life decisions.

And all of these — aside from about a dozen granted to gay lesbian couples under the state’s domestic partnership laws — are handed out based not on the notion of a committed relationship, but on what is an arbitrary and outdated religious definition.
“Our society and laws view marriage as something more than just state recognition of a committed relationship between two adults,” the state appellate court wrote last year in upholding the state’s gay marriage ban. “Our leading religions view marriage as a union of men and women recognized by God, and our society considers marriage between a man and woman to play a vital role in propagating the species and in providing the ideal environment for raising children.”

The assumption made by the court was that children are best served when they have two parents, one male and one female, and that other family constructs are inferior by their very nature.

While most would consider the proposition logical, the research is murky and all of us probably know at least one or two families that don’t fit the profile, but have healthy and well-adjusted children.

And there is something hypocritical in all of this, especially when you consider that my wife and I, who have chosen not to have children, are entitled to all the protection the law provides, while Suyin and Sarah Lael, who have adopted three daughters, are not.

The Laels have been together 15 years, own a home together and are raising a family. They’ve obviously made the kind of commitment that Annie and I have.
And yet, the state does not see it that way, and that is the rub.

Too much of the debate has centered on the notion of tradition, on how society and religion have historically viewed marriage. But religion and society have been wrong in the past — slavery, and later Jim Crow laws, standing as one of the most notable examples.

And tradition has a way of changing over time. Implicit in an earlier understanding of marriage, for instance, was the notion that the man was in charge and that a woman’s legal rights derived from her husband.

Our conception of family has changed, as well, in recent years growing to encompass single-parent families, so-called blended families and all manner of extended arrangements. That there is still resistance to granting gay and lesbian couples the same kind of rights the rest of us enjoy is shameful.

“Your family is really the center of your existence,” Suyin Lael told our reporter, Marisa Maldonado, this week. “You work, you go to school, you’ve done all the right things. But there’s something else you can’t control.”

And that is just plain wrong.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick