N.J. words leave gays at a loss

If you ever needed proof that politicians are spineless, last week's meeting of New Jersey's Assembly Judiciary Committee was as good as any.

After hours of often tearful testimony about a modern twist on Jim Crow laws, six legislators decided to make verbal discrimination a sign of these trying times.

They're really, really sorry, folks, but letting gay and lesbian couples use their "sweetie" as a tax exemption is about as good as it's going to get.

It's just that, well, the entire Legislature is up for reelection next year.  Taking the time to air the issue on behalf of 20,000 gay couples and 12,000 children isn't worth the risk, even if the state Supreme Court kind of ordered them to do the right thing.

"We don't have the votes, and we can't get the votes," Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo (D., Essex) lamented after the group voted, 4-2, on a rush-rush civil-unions measure that some see as a safe cop-out that could earn a rebuke from the high court.

Caraballo defended the compromise, calling civil unions a "huge step in making sure everyone in our state is treated equally."

Read that quote again, out loud, especially if you happen to be black, Jewish, Native American, female, disabled, or from any other group that remembers what it's like to get spit on, smacked around, or denied a job, a house, a vote, an education, or a bus seat because of inequality.

For you, those days are long gone. For others, they're just beginning.

Luckily for the leery legislators, the public is equally perplexed.

In a new Quinnipiac University poll, New Jersey voters opposed (50 percent to 44 percent) allowing same-sex couples to marry, with most (60 percent to 35 percent) preferring to grant them all the legal rights of wedded bliss within the clunky context of civil unions.

The message:  Words matter.

In the very same poll, an even wider margin of voters (58 percent to 37 percent) opposed a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The message:  Words matter.

It's obvious after the testimony -- and the news that Vice President Cheney's daughter and her lesbian partner will soon be parents -- that committed same-sex couples are going to keep buying houses, having kids, joining the PTA and singing in church no matter what you call them or how you denounce them.

But since you brought it up, on this issue, they're really not that different from the people in the polls after all.

Gay or straight, when it comes to something as sacred as marriage, words matter.

"I'm just a regular guy, a voter, a taxpayer, and I'm also gay," Steve McIntyre of North Plainfield, N.J., told the crowd at the committee meeting.

McIntyre said he had been with "the man of my dreams" for 20 years, but they're the only couple in the family not on the wall of wedding portraits at his mother's Florida condo in Cocoa Beach.

"He's not my roommate.  He's not my partner.  He's my husband," McIntyre said.  "He's not my civil partner, not my discriminatory other language."

Imagine having to come up with another name for your spouse or children and then explain it to everyone you meet.  It wouldn't sound the same, so it wouldn't be the same.

"Marriage is to civil unions as Mom is to legal guardian," quipped Lambda Legal attorney David Buckel.

Julie and Lianne Sullivan-Crowley know that firsthand.  They married in Massachusetts days after that state's law passed, only to find themselves in a linguistic and legal limbo when they moved to Princeton for Lianne's job.

They had been together seven years before marrying, and weren't sure what to expect from being able to sign on the dotted line.

"You think that it wouldn't feel any different, but it did," Julie told me after her testimony.

And yet now that they're New Jerseyans, the mothers of two find their relationship challenged all over again.

"Are we married?" Julie Sullivan-Crowley asked the committee.

"Apparently not," chairwoman Linda Greenstein (D., Middlesex) said.

And not they will remain, unless the full Legislature or Corzine gets wise to the power of words.

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