remember all those marriage protection amendments?

[acroyear]

You know, the ones where the proponents insisted verbally that the amendment didn't mean that same sex couples that get private contractual agreements for benefits would have their rights to such contracts and benefits slashed?

And remember how we read them as saying EXACTLY that - that the text was precisely the type that would void such contracts and give gay couples absolutely no rights at all.

And they insisted NO, we wouldn't want to do something like that, we just want to protect marriage.

Well, the courts have finally had their say, and we were right.

Gay couples are fucked.

As are their children.

No health care benefits even if the company wants to give them, no visitation rights in a hospital, no beneficiary agreements for stocks and insurance, no joint mortgages, nothing.  not even a car loan co-signing.

In the state of Michigan, if these contracts involve a gay couple they are as of now null and void.

The religious right assholes just got their wish - being gay means being a second class citizen in that state forever.

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Michigan Partnership Benefits Killed by Court:

In a long-awaited and very disappointing ruling, the Michigan Supreme Court has ruled that any partnership benefits granted to gay couples, even those as part of negotiated union agreements, are unconstitutional under the anti-gay marriage amendment, Proposal 2, passed in 2004. After the passage of that amendment, the attorney general ruled that a state contract that included such benefits was illegal and that ruling was challenged on behalf of several cities and public universities in the state.

The district court ruled that Proposal 2 did not affect such benefits, but that was overturned by the appeals court and the supreme court upheld the appeals court ruling. The tragic irony of this is that despite the "save the children" rhetoric from the anti-gay crowd, the first people affected by this ruling will be the children of gay couples who may lose health care and other protections as a result.

What makes me pissed is this exact same text passed in Virginia and no matter how hard I tried to explain that this would happen, I still couldn't get my mother passed the "but it's protecting marriage" bullshit.

She voted for it here.

And REALLY pissed me off.

And this is why.

You give a community an anonymous way to show themselves as utter bigots and they will do exactly that.  The churches of the religious right today are utterly founded on principles bigotry and hatred.

And yes, I WILL hate them back.

Comments

[mandrakan.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I was right that the decision did not decide the issue, but you're right that the language is not entirely clear (although I believe there is a canon of construction that says that laws that are not clear do not disrupt private contractual relationships. It comes up frequently in Contract Clause cases (Art. I, sec. 10), which I imagine would be implicated in a case challenging a private contract on the basis of this statute.).

Even if that canon did not apply, though, I would have a hard time applying it to a contract between Ford and its employee to provide his domestic partner with health insurance benefits. That's very different from a contract between two partners with regard to property rights or visitation rights.

Not that that resolves the issue, of course.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

BTW, the Ford example you describe - up until 2005 that very thing was illegal in Virginia.

Yes I agree that the contract clause may (eventually) have something to say about all of this, but that requires 1) a test case in the state, 2) a lot of money, and 3) a rights-respecting supreme court by the time the case gets up there.