And this arrangement is deliberately used against gay people only to it’s effect.

Correct that DOMA is the wrench in the mechanism. Because it also limits the legal marriages of gay couples outside of the five states they are licensed in.

Hetero couples, are married anywhere and everywhere they are on this planet. Every state and country worldwide understands the primacy of the relationship. That it’s the SPOUSE that is the only other party to consult on any of the public business that couple engages in.
CU’s and DP’s render all that impossible, and DOMA renders that right of custody and primacy irrelevant everywhere.
So CU’s and DP’s are anywhere close to equal. Just both equally separate.
And definitely unequal to the legal NECESSITIES of marriage.

DOMA is not the only significant problem. Marriage carries the same rights and obligations throughout the nation and carries over to other countries generally. Civil Unions and Domestic Partnerships are constructs of individual states and mean different things depending on which state sanctions it. The same names are used indescriminately for marriage equivalents and for largely useless registries and anything in between.

Otherwise state-wide DPs seem to be confined to the West Coast, while the rest of the country used CUs

Yes, the strike-throughs are mine.

You are mistaken about California. We don’t have Civil Unions, we have Domestic Partnerships. And while they are completely equal in state-granted rights and obligations, they are different in the way in which they are conducted and recorded.

You are completely correct on social security, citizenship, and federal taxes. But child custody is a state decision and not necessarily impacted by DOMA (so far, failure to recognize other-state unions has not resulted in failure to recognize custody rulings).

All of which proves our point that this mess of alternate half-way provisions is pointless and confusing – even to those of us which follow it. Yes, DOMA has to go, but so too must the wacky state-wide discriminatory bans and partial-bans.

I have great hopes for change in 2012.

I think most people are confused by terms civil unions, domestic parnterships, and same-sex marriage and believe that they can be used interchangeably, which is true in terminology in most cases, but not in legal status.

I’m not sure if it applies in NY or IA, but in CA, if I’m not mistaken, Civil Unions are the same thing as same-sex marriages at least in regards to the legal technicalities (rights and responsibilities and such).

To me, the bigger issue is DOMA which really does create a “separate but equal” issue when it comes to comparing traditional marriages to same-sex ones, because no matter what it’s called be it DP, CU, or SSM, a married same-sex
couple cannot file a joint Fed Tax return nor can the surviving spouse collect Social Security death benefits, not to mention custodial rights if there’s a child involved, or even apply for citizenship, all of which goes to married straight couples either as a rule or a courtesy.

Until we get rid of DOMA, same-sex couples will always be seated at the back of the bus to their straight counterparts.

BTW, Happy New Year, BTB and its readers! :-D

The big problem with “civil union” is the phrase itself — it does not render into English well. What are we to say? “We were civil unioned yesterday”? “We’re civil unioned”? It’s not a word, this “unioned” and it makes no sense. Civil Engineers, sure. Workers unions, why not. But “civil union” just doesn’t make the cut.

There is a partial workaround to this problem: Gay couples can simply say they are married, and no one can stop them. They don’t even have to be ‘civil unioned,’ ‘domestically partnered,’ or joined in a ceremony to say they are married. There used to be (and maybe still is?) a concept of “common law marriages” whereby couples that lived together for long periods were simply recognized as married.

My husband and I live in a state that has no recognition for gay couples at all, and we have not had a ceremony. But, damn it, we’ve been together for over thirty years, and no one is going to stop us from declaring ourselves married and that we are each other’s husbands. This may be one area of life where a fact can simply be willed into existence.

No couple needs the government’s or anyone’s permission to declare themselves married. The question is not whether those couples are married, but whether they receive recognition from others, including government, that is equal to the recognition bestowed on penis/vagina marriages.

I wish this idea would take off and go viral. Then we’d have fun sitting back watching the anti-gay heads explode as gay couples all over the nation publicly declare themselves married and then demand equal recognition.

So much of the debate has been about denying us use of the word marriage. But all we have to do is seize the word, and there is nothing the government or anyone can do to prevent it. So let’s just seize it!