Mark Gabrish Conlan/Zenger's Newsmagazine | 31.05.2003 21:44

Until the GAY Ducks — Carrie Stone, Elisia Ross, Kylie McGrath and Linda Burleigh, who recently completed a cross-country bike ride agitating for legal rights for Gay and Lesbian domestic partners — arrived, most of the meeting San Diego’s LGBT [Queer] Community Center sponsored Friday, May 23 on the rights of Gay and Lesbian couples was a pretty dull program of elected officials and tax lawyers discussing the incredible complications facing two people in a same-gender relationship who want the same legal protections as married heterosexuals.

GAY Ducks Ride Cross-Country for Domestic Partner Rights

GAY Ducks Ride Cross-Country for Domestic Partner Rights
Athletic Activists Highlight Center’s Presentation on Queer Couples’ Rights

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2003 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • Used by permission

Until the GAY Ducks — Carrie Stone, Elisia Ross, Kylie McGrath and Linda Burleigh — arrived, most of the meeting San Diego’s LGBT [Queer] Community Center sponsored Friday, May 23 on the rights of Gay and Lesbian couples was a pretty dull program of elected officials and tax lawyers discussing the incredible complications facing two people in a same-gender relationship who want the same legal protections as married heterosexuals. Then the GAY Ducks, who recently completed a cross-country bike ride to highlight awareness of how the law discriminates against Gay and Lesbian couples, appeared and livened up the meeting considerably.

“GAY Ducks” is short for “Get All Your Ducks in a Row,” though the group also has a more formal name — “Rainbow Law” — and a Web site, www.rainbowlaw.com. Their purpose, as explained in their handout — a little spiral-bound notebook with a rubber duck attached to it by a string — is twofold. One is to make Gay and Lesbian couples in various states aware of what they can do to protect themselves and establish legal rights and responsibilities towards each other. The other is to encourage them to lobby for changes in the law.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” said Stone, Ross’s partner and the spokesperson for GAY Ducks at the May 23 meeting. “It feels like we’re on a different planet with the support you get from your state representatives.” The meeting had started with a speech by openly Lesbian California Assemblymember Christine Kehoe presenting AB 205, a bill before the California legislature she is co-sponsoring with fellow Assemblymembers Jackie Goldberg, John Laird, Mark Leno and Paul Koretz. (Of the five, Koretz is the only one who isn’t Queer.)

According to Kehoe and lobbyist Jeff Koors from Equality California, the statewide Queer organization which is pushing AB 205, if this bill passes Queer couples who register as domestic partners in California will have stronger legal rights than those anywhere else in the country except Vermont, which offers Queer couples so-called “civil union” status almost equivalent to marriage.

However, as Stone pointed out, no state’s domestic partnership or civil union laws — no matter how good they are on paper — are truly equivalent to marriage because all the rights and responsibilities they grant evaporate immediately once the couple leaves their home state. That’s what the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” (DoMA), passed overwhelmingly by bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Clinton in 1998, did.

“Nothing in [AB 205] will help you with Social Security, veterans’ benefits or anything else the federal government controls,” Stone warned. “Even with this state government and this wonderful law, we still have to work with the federal government. We need to write to our federal legislators as well as our state legislators. Polls show 64 percent of Americans support some legislative protections for Gay and Lesbian couples, and 45 percent support marriage rights.”

Stone called her appearances in California “the best reception we’ve had” and said they plan two more cross-country bike rides to call attention to the issue. The one they just completed started in Orlando, Florida and ended in San Francisco. The next two, she said, will start in the west and move east — partly because that will put the prevailing winds at their backs and thus make the ride physically easier, and partly because their receptions got stronger and more positive once they moved west.

“We felt encircled in Gainesville, Florida,” Stone recalled. “We went to Tallahassee (the capital of Florida) and tried to talk with two African-American legislators about the similarities in discrimination [experienced by people of color and Queers], but they were scared even to talk to us. In Mississippi we had a forum like this, but very few people came. Then we went to Louisiana with no event, and in Texas they were very polite but not supportive.” While in Texas, they made a point of visiting Jasper, the town where two whites kidnapped African-American James Byrd, tied him to the back of their truck and dragged him behind their truck as they drove, torturing and slowly killing him. “We were pretty nervous in Jasper and we were definitely not welcome,” Stone said.

Being in the town where James Byrd met his death in a hate crime that shocked the nation led Stone and the other GAY Ducks to reflect on how laws like the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s equivalent, Proposition 22 (passed overwhelmingly by two-thirds of the state’s voters as an initiative after pro-Queer legislators had blocked it in the California State Senate), themselves constitute collective hate crimes against the entire Queer community. “When we read the definition of a hate crime — ‘deprivation of life and liberty on the basis of … sexual orientation’ — and you read the legislative history of Proposition 22 and the Defense of Marriage Act, you’ll see that these laws are hate crimes and the perpetrators are elected officials,” Stone said. “Our slogan next year might be, ‘You don’t need to be tied to a fence to be a victim of a hate crime.’ Every Gay man and Lesbian who has a relationship and wants the protections of marriage is a victim of DoMA.”

After their harrowing experiences in the deep South, things began to turn around for the GAY Ducks when they reached Las Cruces, New Mexico. “In New Mexico, we told them you don’t have to change the world or start on a streetcorner: just work with your families or co-workers or anyone you feel comfortable coming out to,” Stone recalled. “The main reason people vote against laws to help us is ignorance. We need to tell people we’re grandmothers, parents, lawyers, doctors, nurses, veterans, engineers and everyday people. We deliver your mail, we work on your cars, and if you just tell people that many of us lose our homes or our children or our cars, often they’re shocked and appalled. Heterosexual people don’t know that we have no legal rights or protections.”

Koors said that Equality California’s decision to push for a major expansion of domestic partnership rights this year came about as a result of the formation of a LGBT [Queer] Caucus in the California legislature, since the recent elections have produced enough openly Lesbian and Gay legislators to make one feasible. “We decided to push the envelope and introduce three bills: AB 196, AB 17 and AB 205,” Koors explained. AB 196 would extend civil-rights protections on the basis of actual or perceived gender identity — essentially adding Transgender people to California’s basic civil-rights law the way Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals were finally added in 1999. AB 17 would prohibit California state agencies from doing business with companies that don’t offer benefits to domestic partners of their employees comparable to those they offer husbands or wives of their straight employees.

“AB 205 will significantly expand the rights and responsibilities currently provided to registered domestic partners and their families to include nearly all the legal rights, benefits, responsibilities, duties, and obligations under state law currently available only to married couples,” Equality California’s fact sheet on the bill explains. Among those are:

• Financial support during and after the relationship, and community property ownership protections.

• Protection from threats and crimes against the families of public officials.

• Child custody, visitation, and duties of financial support of children.

• Anatomical gifts, consent to autopsy and disposition of remains, and burial in family cemeteries.

• Legal claims dependent on family status, including claims for victim’s compensation.

• Housing protections, including access to family student housing, senior citizen housing, and rent control protections.

• Bereavement leave, family care and medical leave, coverage of partners under medical, dental, life, and disability insurance, pension rights, and death benefits for surviving partners of firefighters and police officers.

• Obligations to make disclosures regarding family relationships and to take other steps to avoid nepotism, conflicts of interest and self-dealing.

• Mutual responsibility for debts to third parties.

• Joint filing of state income tax returns, different tax rates, and estate and gift tax exemptions.

• State and local government-regulated benefits, including workers’ compensation, public assistance, transfer of licenses upon death, and the ability to apply for absentee ballots for a partner.

• Communication privileges, including the right not to be forced to testify against a partner.

According to Koors, originally Equality California worried about the bill’s likely impact on the California state budget and the inevitable argument that it would cost money the state can ill afford during the current budget crisis. Then they received the results of a study they had commissioned from the UCLA Williams Project on Sexual Orientation Law and the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies (IGLSS) which said AB 205 will actually save the state $8.1 to $10.6 million per year — mostly by cutting the number of Gays and Lesbians eligible for public benefits if they have a more affluent partner who can afford to take care of them.

“AB 205 will require the state to count a domestic partner’s income and assets in assessing an individual’s eligibility for means-tested public benefits, reducing the number of people eligible for such benefits,” the UCLA report explained. “Using data from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), we estimate how many partnered Gay or Lesbian people are currently receiving means-tested public benefits. We take into account the possibility that losing public benefits creates a disincentive to register as domestic partners and the fact that low-income couples might still qualify for benefits. Nevertheless, even if only a small percentage of individuals living with partners register as domestic partners and become ineligible for public benefits, the state is likely to reduce its expenditures on these programs by more than $11.5 million per year” — more than offsetting the $1 to $3 million the bill will cost the state, mostly by reducing the taxes of domestic partners filing joint returns.

GAY Ducks/Rainbow Law Web site:  http://www.rainbowlaw.com
Equality California Web site:  http://www.eqca.org
UCLA Report on AB 205:  http://www.eqca.org/news/ab205_fiscalimpact.pdf
Link to report your own experience of discrimination based on sexual orientation:  http://www.eqca.org/institute/index.html#stories

e-mail:: mgconlan@earthlink.net
Homepage:: http://www.rainbowlaw.com