Legal Status Brings
Security to Some
Same-Sex Marriages
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Brian Shumay for The New York Times
Nancy Goldstein and Joan Hilty, at home in Park
Slope, were two of the gay and lesbian New Yorkers who were married
in Massachusetts in May 2004. |
By MANNY FERNANDEZ,
NYTimes on the Web, May 22, 2007
Officially speaking, same-sex couples
who live in New York State cannot be married. Nancy Goldstein and Joan
Hilty, a Brooklyn couple who celebrated their third wedding anniversary on
Saturday, are an unusual exception.
The two women have a pleasant Park Slope apartment, an excitable dog named Juno
and a marriage certificate signed by the town clerk of Provincetown, Mass.
Ms. Goldstein, 45, and Ms. Hilty, 40, were two of the gay and lesbian New
Yorkers who rushed to cities and towns in Massachusetts to get married in May
2004, after it became the first state in the country to legalize same-sex
marriages.
In the three years since then, the validity of their marriage certificate has
been something of a question mark. But Ms. Goldstein and Ms. Hilty learned
last week that a judge had ruled that same-sex couples from New York who married
in Massachusetts from May 2004 to July 2006 have a legally recognized marriage.
“I got married,” said Ms. Goldstein, a director of an advocacy group for
pregnant women. “I did not get civil-unioned. I got married.”
The judge’s ruling, issued on May 10 in Suffolk County Superior Court in Boston,
stemmed from a lawsuit filed on behalf of seven same-sex couples from outside
Massachusetts. (Tanya Wexler and Amy Zimmerman, who were married in May
2004, were the only plaintiffs from New York City.) The court decision was
a little-noticed development in one of the most contentious issues in politics,
raising the population ever so slightly of New York’s legally married same-sex
couples.
“It really is a cloud that’s been removed from these marriages,” said Michele
Granda, a lawyer with Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, the Boston group
that represented the plaintiffs. “There shouldn’t be any question that
those marriage licenses are worth the paper they’re printed on, and that
Massachusetts fully backs the currency.”
The ruling affects only a limited number of New York’s same-sex couples:
those who married in Massachusetts between May 17, 2004, when that state
authorized same-sex marriages, and July 6, 2006, when New York’s highest court
rejected an effort to allow gay marriage. Ms. Granda said the group knows
of nearly 200 affected couples in New York, though she said the number is likely
to be higher.
The lawsuit challenged a decision by Mitt Romney, then the governor, that only
those gay couples who lived or intended to live in Massachusetts, or those
couples whose home state did not forbid same-sex marriage, could get married in
Massachusetts. Last year, a judge ruled that only Rhode Island did not
prohibit same-sex marriage, noting that New York’s highest court ruled on July 6
that it was not permitted.
But lawyers for the out-of-state couples argued that those who had married in
Massachusetts before the New York ruling had valid marriages.
Andrew M. Cuomo, the attorney general of New York, has not said whether he would
challenge the ruling, but he was not expected to do so. Jeffrey Lerner, a
spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said New York law requires the state to recognize
marriages validly performed in other states.
Scores of other same-sex couples in New York have been married in Canada since
2003, when the Ontario Court of Appeal extended marriage rights to same-sex
couples. Brendan Fay, a Queens man who runs a group called the Civil
Marriage Trail Project, has helped coordinate marriages in Canada for dozens of
gay and lesbian New Yorkers. He helped organize a wedding scheduled for
tonight at a Toronto hotel between two Manhattan women: Edie Windsor, 75,
and Thea Spyer, 77, who have been together for four decades.
For those New York couples married in Massachusetts, the recent ruling
represented a symbolic victory, but also a kind of delayed confirmation. Some
said they already considered themselves married after receiving their marriage
licenses in Massachusetts three years ago. They have since exchanged rings and
vows, celebrated anniversaries and grown accustomed to referring to their
partners as their spouses.
“We had held ourselves out as a married couple anyway,” said Vincent Maniscalco,
45, who married Edward DeBonis, 54, at the city hall in Somerville, Mass., in
2004. The couple, who co-own a legal search firm, live in Averill Park, N.Y.
“This was sort of a reaffirmation and a clarification,” Mr. Maniscalco said.
Michael Adams, 45, remembers driving 200 miles with his partner one night in
late May three years ago, from Queens to North Attleborough, Mass. They checked
into a Holiday Inn, went the next morning to the town hall, asked a judge to
waive the three-day waiting period for marriage license applications and then
drove across the state, license in hand, to the home of the minister who married
them at a park where two streams join together.
“The whole day was unbelievable,” said Mr. Adams, who now lives with his
husband, Fred Davie, 51, in Brooklyn. “It was really having to work hard to make
this happen. As far as we were concerned, we were married.”
Gov. Eliot Spitzer has proposed a bill that would make New York the second state
to allow gay marriage; a handful of others, including Connecticut and New
Jersey, have civil unions. But he faces opposition in the Republican-led Senate.
Even for the New York couples who married in Massachusetts, questions remain
about the extent of the benefits and protections — like health insurance,
pensions and property — their new status gives them. New York’s same-sex couples
who married out of state frequently find themselves navigating often-murky legal
terrain.
Mr. Adams said he and his husband mark themselves as single when filling out
their state income tax returns, but they each attach a statement explaining that
they were married in Massachusetts. Now they will mark themselves as married and
send in a joint return. However, they will not be able to do so on federal tax
forms: the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act defines marriage as between a
man and a woman.
Ms. Goldstein and Ms. Hilty keep their original marriage certificate close at
hand rather than framed at home. “We had to bring this and flash it to the car
rental people in Puerto Rico to get the married couple’s rate,” Ms. Goldstein
explained, holding the certificate.
After their marriage, Ms. Goldstein went to a legal clinic for gays and lesbians
to get assistance in filling out several legal forms. One was a notarized
statement from Ms. Hilty giving Ms. Goldstein first preference to visit her at a
hospital; another named Ms. Goldstein as Ms. Hilty’s health care proxy.
The ruling gave their Provincetown certificate more of a legal sheen, but as a
practical matter it did not have an immediate impact on their marriage. Their
anniversary — a low-key dinner at the Grocery in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn —
felt just as real as before.
Ms. Goldstein and members of some of the other couples said they now felt less
vulnerable about their legal status. “These are some of the things that I hope
will be less necessary in New York with this recent ruling,” Ms. Goldstein said
of the six legal forms she keeps with her marriage certificate.
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