Benefits approved,
now recognition for gays
EDITORIAL, Home News
Tribune Online (thnt.com) December 8, 2006
An opportunity is at hand for New
Jersey to deal with one of the most contentious public-policy issues of our
time: the formal union of gay couples.
The Assembly Judiciary Committee Wednesday approved a bill that would allow gay
couples the benefits of marriage, but not the title, in a move that places the
measure on a track for possible approval by the end of the year.
Even if this bill is enacted, it is already clear that it will not satisfy
everyone on either side of the debate.
One of the biggest obstacles to such an outcome is language — what such a union
is to be called; but the question of language overlays some deeply held
religious beliefs as well as some less elevated personal biases.
One option the government — specifically, the Legislature — does not have is to
leave the subject alone. It's too late for that. The state Supreme
Court ruled in October that New Jersey must give gay couples all the benefits of
marriage, but left it to the Legislature to decide what to call the institution
— namely, whether to call it marriage — a term whose meaning at present is
defined by state law.
When public opinion polls have been taken on this subject — including a
Quinnipiac University poll published Wednesday — more New Jerseyans than not
have said that they would support the unions in themselves, but don't think they
should be called marriages. The reason for that seems to be a conviction —
rooted more in religious doctrine and in tradition than in cold logic — that
marriage, by its nature, requires that the partners be a man and a woman.
Gay people and those who support gay people on this issue argue that omitting
the term marriage is discriminatory and that it consigns gay couples to a
second-class status.
In the Supreme Court's majority opinion, Justice Barry Albin wrote: "We
have decided that our State Constitution guarantees that every statutory right
and benefit conferred to heterosexual couples through civil marriage must be
made available to committed same-sex couples. Now, the Legislature must
determine whether to alter the long accepted definition of marriage. The
great engine for social change in this country has always been the democratic
process."
Albin, on the court's behalf, wrote that the Legislature could satisfy the
court's mandate either by amending the state statutes that define marriage as
the union of a man and a woman, or by creating a "parallel statutory structure
by another name" that would give gay couples the same rights and the same
obligations that marriage gives heterosexuals.
The Legislature has chosen the second — and, may we say — politically safer
course. The measure now moving through the Assembly would create what it
calls "civil unions," the term adopted by Vermont and Connecticut.
Why wouldn't lawmakers take the bolder step and change the marriage laws,
essentially saying that what quacks like a duck is a duck? Maybe it has to
do with taking the public pulse.
"Although courts can ensure equal treatment," Albin wrote for the court, "they
cannot guarantee social acceptance, which must come through the evolving ethos
of a maturing society."
That's a concept that would be familiar to millions of black Americans who
learned the hard way the difference between equality under the law and equality
in the minds of their countrymen.
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