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Women's Rights
What's New? - Archive
WomenMatter will continuously post updates on all this and other issues as we monitor the continuing philosophical and practical debates nationwide.
Please check back often for updates. Past updates are available for reference on the Women's Rights Archives page.
Since Women's Rights is in many ways an umbrella issue, WomenMatter will highlight related updates from other Life Issue areas here:
Love in New Jersey: Domestic Partnerships Abound
On January 12, 2004, New Jersey Governor James E. McGreevey signed the Domestic Partnership Act, legislation that grants domestic partnership rights to same-sex couples.
New Jersey is the fifth state to grant gay and lesbian couples limited rights. Vermont, California, and Hawaii have similar domestic partnership laws, and a Massachusetts state court granted same-sex couples the right to marry last November.
The New Jersey law takes effect Monday, July 11th 2004, but you can bet there will be a fight to tear it down before then.
Backlash
The League of American Families has already hired lawyers and scholars to scrutinize the constitutionality of the new law. Such groups fear that domestic partnership laws are the first step towards the legalization of gay marriage.
Several Christian advocacy groups are pressuring President Bush to endorse a constitutional amendment that would define “marriage" as a union between a man and a woman. Organizations like Focus on the Family feel that limiting the definition of marriage within the constitution itself may be the only way to prevent states from granting marriage rights to gays and lesbians.
Go marriage!
Bush is shying away from the amendment, but has announced a $1.5 billion drive to promote marriage.
The vague objective of the healthy marriage initiative is to endorse the concept of marriage as the building block of society. The program’s specific targets are primarily poor, urban minorities and youth.
The administration has pushed marriage for welfare mothers and for inner city communities that, in Bush’s opinion, need to utilize the economic advantages of marriage. The marriage drive also complements abstinence-only programs targeted towards youth.
As to be expected, the healthy marriage initiative promotes heterosexual marriage only. So, a side effect of the program is this clear and unrelenting Bush-administration message: marriage is great, marriage is good, and marriage is only great and good for heterosexual couples.
But...
While the initiative jives with traditional Christian groups, it also unwittingly corroborates the arguments of gay and lesbian rights groups.
Advocates of gay and lesbian marriage offer the following argument: “If strong marriages make a strong society, why not let all committed couples participate?"
For more on the Bush administration’s approach to marriage, click here.
The details
The new New Jersey law offers couples that file an Affidavit of Domestic Partnership the following benefits:
- Hospital visitations and medical decisions.
- An additional exemption on state income tax returns if partner has no taxable income.
- No state inheritance tax on inheritance left by one partner to the other.
- State health insurance and pension coverage for same-sex partners.
Domestic partners do not have all of the legal rights or obligations of married couples. The law does not grant custody rights to children, the right to inheritance in the absence of a will, the right to file a joint tax return, the right to family leave benefits, nor the liability for a partner’s financial debt.
Can domestic partners be heterosexual?
The NJ domestic partnership law also applies to heterosexual couples over 62 years of age. The law is limited to elderly couples because lawmakers feared a major loss in tax revenue and an unaffordable payout in domestic partner health benefits if they were to extend it to all committed couples living together.
Many elderly heterosexual couples choose not to marry in order to hold on to the pension or retirement benefits from a previous spouse, but are just as committed as any other married couple. The new law benefits these couples in particular; it grants them the right to make medical decisions for each other.
Under the new law, same-sex domestic partners need not be gay or lesbian. For example, if two heterosexual women want to live together, share expenses, and be domestic partners, they are allowed to do so. The law states that domestic partners must simply "share each other’s lives in a committed relationship of mutual caring."
In New Jersey, partnerships are defined by commitment and love, instead of by gender and sexuality.
To discuss this issue with other WomenMatter readers, log on to one of our online forums. Read more about women’s rights, and when you feel inspired, contact your representatives and let them know what you think.
Article Posted on: 1/16/2004
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