Foot, Meet Bullet
Well, well, well. It turns out that little vote we Washingtonians (well, not we precisely because I never registered to vote and Peter was somehow listed as “inactive” (uh huh suuuuure)) just had on Prop 71 with the obnoxious “Protect all Washington families” tagline (and “keep the domestic partnership line” tagline on most of the lawn signs) was actually kind of a good law in a way that I’ve been banging on about. According to RC2:
2) As I understand it (it’s hard to find anyone serious paying this much attention, so I promulgate this argument with some caution), Referendum 71 ratifies a domestic partnership law that includes same-sex relationships, but isn’t limited to them. In fact (or at least according to Wiki, which is sometimes more truthy than right), the law
• explicitly defines marriage as only between a man and a woman and
• includes any partnership including a person over the age of 62
So clearly (presuming my info’s correct), even though homosexual partners are included in the measure, it is garnering support also from non-sexual parent-child or aging sibling partners who want to facilitate health coverage and end of life decisions and shack-up partners about whose children the law needs some stability. The referendum is arguably as much about health care as anything else, therefore.
As (predictably, the reliable) India Knight had a few years ago:
Joyce and Sibyl Burden have lived together for their entire lives — beat that. Joyce is 88 and Sibyl is 80. They are sisters, both spinsters, and have shared a three-bedroom home in Wiltshire for the past 40 years. Last week they lost the case that they had, in desperation, taken to the European Court of Human Rights, which they had contacted themselves. The sisters had argued that they should be spared inheritance tax in the same way as married people or same-sex couples who formalise their union with a civil partnership.
They lost, which means that one of them will have to leave her home of 40 years when her sister dies — or find £61,000 in inheritance tax, which isn’t going to happen, since she will be alone, childless and very old. What is she supposed to do — get a Saturday job? “I am terribly upset by this and I just don’t know what we are going to do,” Joyce said last week. “We have spent our lives looking after people and never once done anything wrong. And now we are being punished for doing the right thing. This government is always going out of its way to give rights to people who have done nothing to deserve them. If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world. But we are sisters and it seems we have no rights at all.”
So Washington was actually going to do something nice for people like the Burden sisters (assuming RC2 has her information correct) (and, interesting name, no?), but because supporters kept banging on about gay couples’ rights, half the state voted against it.
(Err, quick update: I’m pretty sure the law has passed but it’s achingly close.)
November 6th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
To make my own position clear, I think the WA domestic partnership law is bad because it explicitly defines basically any relationship as “the same as marriage.”
If that law is to stand, however, I’m not sure Prop 71 is so terrible –seems to me like basically a let’s not re-write a whole code of law for shack-ups and other iterations of family where custody and distribution of property is concerned. I see that more as a practical accommodation to reality than anything else.
I stand by my position regarding the politics involved: namely, that even in Washington State, you can’t get a majority to say that same sex partnerships are marriage, and even to get a domestic partnership bill through, you have to include the Burden sisters and not create a special gays-only privilege. And therefore, the law doesn’t mean what gay marriage pushers would have it mean.