Civil Unions Are Not Marriage

As I engage in my almost daily habit of perusing the latest news on marriage equality, I find myself increasingly frustrated that civil unions are still proposed as a potential “compromise.” It might sound like a viable and even perfectly reasonable solution to those who have not actually researched the matter. Yet for those who have actually pursued the law on behalf of the public have already come to agree that this is not an acceptable legal alternative.

In an effort to help enlighten others on the issue, I decided to share my research thus far. A civil union reflects a second-class status that fails to protect committed same-sex couples who choose to be married. How can this be, you ask? Is not the idea to provide same-sex couples with the same rights as married couples without calling it “married?” Let me answer that with a few examples of how it has worked thus far.

It has been established that there are over 1100 rights and responsibilities that come with being married in the eyes of the Federal government. But even on a state level, most states have an additional 1000 or more state rights and responsibilities. These range from spousal inheritance rights to the ability to file joint tax returns to child custody rules to the transferring of workers’ compensation benefits. Some of these are fundamental, some are mundane, but all serve to underscore how deeply interwoven states’ marriage laws are and how extraordinarily they reach into the lives of countless people.

Consider New Jersey which granted civil unions to gay and lesbian couples in 2006. Many employers refused to offer them partner benefits because they were not legally married. Hospitals denied them the rights of married couples, checking the “single” box rather than the “married” box on patients’ admissions forms, thereby denying them access to hospitalized loved ones. Gay and lesbian couples were put at risk in emergencies when traveling because civil unions, unlike marriages, are not recognized across state lines.

All of these legal uncertainties led the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission to ultimately declare civil unions a failure, finding that separate categorization “invites and encourages unequal treatment of same-sex couples and their children.”

New Jersey is not the only state to have arrived at that conclusion. Connecticut and New Hampshire have both replaced their civil union statutes with marriage for all couples. And legislators in Vermont voted to do the same by a two-thirds, bipartisan majority.

Simply put, a civil union is not a marriage, nor is it an adequate substitute for one. To suggest otherwise is a cruel fiction. Even if all of the inherent confusion and complexities could somehow be resolved and civil unions could provide couples with the same rights and responsibilities of a true marriage, the separation of the two institutions creates a badge of inferiority that forever stigmatizes the relationships of committed same-sex couples as different, separate, unequal and less worthy.