As a long-time champion of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, it pains me to have to criticize that organization, as well as the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, for its just-unveiled Rock for Equality action. The premise of the action is simple -- and misguided: that same-sex couples, who, even if they marry, cannot have their marriages recognized under federal law, are discriminated against in social security benefits. ...

This is a hard issue to understand and to explain. I'm going to try. One type of married couple gets this kind of windfall under Social Security -- it's the type of family that Congress had in mind in 1939, when it created the system and only 15% of married women earned their own income. When one spouse has earned all or the vast majority of the couple's income, the non-earner or low-earner spouse gets a retirement benefit equal to half her spouse's, even if she never paid into Social Security; and if her spouse dies first, she will then receive the amount of money he was receiving. Example: If his lifetime earnings entitle him to $1,800/month in benefits, she will receive $900 while he is alive and $1,800 once he dies. (So the household has $2,700/mo. while he is alive and $1,800 when he dies).

When a same-sex couple resembles this couple's earning pattern, that couple is, indeed, disadvantaged by being considered unmarried, when the couple is actually married in a state that allows it.

But same-sex couples with two earners, whose lifetime earnings are pretty close to each other(I'm pretty sure my friend and her partner fall into this category), will gain nothing by being considered married. Instead, they will find themselves, like equal-earning heterosexual couples (including most African-American married couples), paying more into the system and getting less out. Let's say each partner is entitled to $1,350/mo. based on her own earnings. Sure, if they are married, each can qualify for a spousal benefit. But that benefit is instead of, not on top of, what each qualifies for on her own. So the spousal benefit is only $675/mo. instead of $1,350, which, of course, no one would choose. So that household also gets $2,700/mo. while both are alive. But when the first spouse dies, the survivor simply keeps her own benefit -- $1,350. The surviving spouse sees a 50% cut in benefits to the household, compared to the 33% cut experienced by the surviving stay-at-home spouse whose deceased spouse earned all the family's income. ...

Scholars and advocates unconnected to the gay rights movement have been pointing out for years how unfair this system is...to equal earning married couples and to single parents, whose lifetime earnings suffer because of their childcare responsibilities and who have no income-earning spouse confering a spousal benefit. Research by the Institute for Women's Policy Research [pdf] and law professor Dorothy Brown [pdf] demonstrates that black couples are disadvantaged by the current Social Security system.

Labels: economics, family policy, gay couples, Marriage, Nancy Polikoff, race

posted by Eve at 8:25 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...Anyway, I was surprised to see the issue come up immediately in this trial. Judge Walker interrupted Olson's opening statement to ask (among other things) if California could get out of the marriage business altogether and just provide domestic partnership for all couples. He pressed the point through additional questions, even though Olson said the state would never "get out of the marriage business."

Subsequently, according to Prop8trialtracker.com, (scroll down to 3:20 pm update), the judge asked one of the plaintiffs, Sandy Stier,

"If the state were to get out of the business of using the term marriage, but created another name for it for all people, domestic union or whatever, would not that put you on the same plane as all others?

Sandy: I believe so. Yes. If we had the same access, I’d feel equal.

Judge: Even though the term marriage is not used?

Sandy: Yes, because if it’s not a legal status sanctioned by the state or government, I'd not have to worry about access to it because no one else would either."

Note that this is not the common answer from proponents of marriage equality. Yet it is precisely the glorification of marriage that I find so disturbing about same-sex marriage advocacy. On the same day of testimony, Sandy's partner, Kris Perry, (scroll to 2:46 pm)testified that:

"I don’t have access to the word to describe our relationship. Marriage appears to be really important to people. I’d like to use the word, too. You chose that person over everyone else. You feel that it should stick. You want the public support and inclusion that comes with marriage. If we got married, it would be an enormous relief to our straight friends who feel sorry for us. I can’t stand it. They have a word. They belong to this institution. Sandy and I went to a school football game. I realized they were all married and we’re not."

And in what I find the most disturbing portrayal of marriage, plaintiff Jeff Zarrillo said (scroll to 11;34 am):

"We have not had children because Paul and I believe that it’s an important step for us to be married before we have children. It would make it easier for us and our children to explain our relationship. It would afford different protections for our child. If we enter into that institution, we would want all of the protections so nothing could eradicate that nuclear family."

Of course this is completely in keeping with the argument that children do best with married parents, but that's an argument with its origin in opposition to same-sex marriage (Just look at the Hawaii litigation, for example.) Back when marriage equality was not a prominent item on the gay rights agenda, LGBT rights advocates opposed that reasoning, arguing that children do just as well with a gay or lesbian parent or with a same-sex couple. Now in furtherance of marriage equality, advocates assert that children with same-sex parents will be better off if those parents are married. Let me tear my hair out now. The tangible benefits of having two parents are not supposed to turn on whether those parents are married. I've written about this at length.

Labels: beyond marriage, gay marriage, Marriage, Nancy Polikoff

posted by Eve at 8:43 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

I failed to note in my last post an unusual and important aspect of Delaware's new statute creating parentage in a person who qualifies as a "de facto" parent:
This is a statute that explicitly authorizes three parents (or more) for a child.

The statutory interpretation is easy. A "de facto" parent must satisfy the criteria (check my last post for these). The first criterion is "has had the support and consent of the child's parent or parents..." So a child can already have two parents. Both those parents must consent to and foster a parental relationship between the child and another person. That person then satisfies the remaining statutory criteria, and, voila, the child has three legal parents.

The entire subject of more-than-two parents is severely untheorized, and the law in this area is profoundly underdeveloped. When you consider the number of children whose parents divorce and then couple with other partners, there are many, many children with more than two parental figures. The standard course, however, is that for a step-parent to become a legal parent that person must adopt the child and for that to happen the noncustodial parent must consent to termination of his/her parental rights.

There are a handful of court decisions allocating the rights and responsibilities of parentage among more than two parents, including a few states in which trial courts have granted third parent adoption decrees to the partner of the biological mother when the semen donor is also a functional (and legal) parent. But those are the exception.

When I was in Australia earlier this year, I spent some time with a family of four parents...the bio mom, her partner, the semen donor/bio dad, and his partner. The women are the primary parents. The men are secondary parents. The child is seven years old, and the relationships have been stable throughout his life. Australia's parentage reforms of the past year do not allow for even three parents, let alone four. ...

Of course the Delaware statute isn't just for same-sex couples and our families. And since there are way more heterosexual families, I wouldn't be surprised if the first three-legal-parents family in Delaware is a divorced couple and a step-parent -- all by consent. After the stepparent has a bonded parental relationship with the child for a sufficient period of time, and with the agreement of both the child's legal parents, a court should issue a parentage order to the step-parent. It does happen that post-divorce family configurations actually work well enough for such an arrangement to be appropriate --- to be the matching of legal parentage to all the child's emotional parental relationships.

Labels: beyond marriage, de facto parenting, Delaware, donor conception, Nancy Polikoff

posted by Eve at 1:20 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT