Congratulations to all the gay couples in New Jersey who are finally able to get married today!
(And wow – my family’s rabbi helped officiate the first ceremony just after midnight.)
What’s that, you say? It’s not actually marriage, but just a civil union, grumble grumble spineless New Jersey legislators grumble grumble?
Well actually, it is marriage – state marriage, not federal marriage, but marriage nonetheless – no matter what the statutes and the licenses say. Gay couples in New Jersey, as of today, are entitled to all the rights and responsibilities that straight couples can have. All the exact same ones. You can take your spouse’s name, you can adopt your spouse’s biological children, your children are “legitimate,” you can’t be forced to testify against your spouse in court, you can leave your property to your spouse, you have automatic hospital visitation rights, and so on. It’s marriage.
While the technical term is “civil union,” gay couples who are civil-unioned need to begin referring to themselves as married – which they are legally allowed to do. (The New Jersey Supreme Court stated in its opinion last fall that after the new law goes into effect, “same-sex couples will be free to call their relationships by the name they choose” no matter what name the legislators give to the unions.) Only by referring to themselves as married – only by referring to their relationships as marriages – will gay couples help their fellow New Jerseyans realize that civil unions and marriages must be treated the same way legally. And it will help those relationships become more accepted socially as well.
I’m tired of hearing people complain that all they can get is this civil union thing and it’s not really marriage. If you keep up that attitude, other people are going to start believing it. So stop it.
Yes, the legislature stopped short of using the word marriage. So what? You’re married. Make sure everyone knows what that means.
Congratulations!
I understand your post here (and I really do respect your views)however, the federal government and most states do not recognize the unions. That means, for instance, that a surviving member of a civil union would not be entitled to his deceased partner’s Social Security benefits. And if a partner is hospitalized in another state, the other may not be allowed to visit.
Some may call this ‘almost marriage’ but history is my guide, and proves ’seperate but equal’ is a wrong policy.
The fact that marriage and all the rights that follow cannot be replicated by any other social contract, including civil unions, is the main reason I have problems with the outcome from the Garden State. When we say the word marriage we all know what it means both in tangible and intangible ways. There is no way to shortcut the path to justice.
This looks like a great article. Unfortunately, the right column blocks the right side of the text in both Explorer and Mozilla. I’m sorry I missed this.
B: How big is your screen?
Deke: the fact that the federal government and most states do not recognize the New Jersey unions isn’t the fault of New Jersey. It’s the fault of DOMA. Had the NJ legislature called the same-sex unions “marriages” instead of “civil unions,” the federal government and most states still wouldn’t recognize them. By your logic, same-sex marriages in Massachusetts aren’t marriages either.
Should there come a day when DOMA is repealed and the federal government decides to recognize same-sex marriages, civil-unioned couples feasibly could have an argument that civil unions are no longer the same as marriage and win a court case or get a new law passed. Until then, they’re legally the same thing.
The inequality is a social one. And that’s the point I’m trying to make – not that civil unions are good enough, but that right now, we have to *make them* good enough. Until we get the legal word “marriage,” gay CU’d couples in New Jersey need to refer to themselves as married, so that they can drum it into everyone’s heads that the legal rights are the same.
FYI, I, also, have never been able to see the last 6 or 8 characters in each line because of the way the side bar floats over the text… changing browsers or browser settings doesn’t seem to help. It turns reading your posts into a bit of a guessing game. (I’m reading on my 15″ MacBook Pro).
Anyway, I enjoyed your post. While I agree with what you say, it seems to me that whatever the couples call themselves, the state legislature’s explicitly saying “this isn’t called marriage” is a pretty powerful justification for people to not treat the two equally (on a social and emotional level, not a legal one).
See, I disagree that it’s the same. If it were the same, the legislature would not have created a “parallel statutory structure.” As Chief Justice Poritz pointed out in her dissent in Lewis v. Harris, the court’s ruling did not provide the relief the plaintiffs sought: they asked for marriage, and the court said the legislature could give them something else. The very fact that the legislature felt the need to create “civil unions” implies that there is some as-yet unarticulated reason why gay people are not entitled to use the word “married” in a fully legal sense.