Benefits approved,

now recognition for gays

EDITORIAL, Home News Tribune Online (thnt.com) Dec 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.