Not being able to marry her same-sex partner of eight years has been a burden for Rebecca Allegretto, not only emotionally, but financially as well.
Allegretto, a clinical nurse at the UCLA Medical Center said she would like to have the stability of marriage and the tax benefits as well.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has vetoed two bills that would allow marriage equality because it’s a decision he believes the Supreme Court should make, according to his veto message in October 2007.
The California Supreme Court will meet March 4 to hear arguments for and against recognizing same-sex marriages legally conducted in other states.
Allegretto said she is unable to receive tax benefits given to married couples. For example, Allegretto receives health care benefits for her and her partner through work and had they been married, she wouldn’t have to pay taxes on her partner’s benefits.
For Brian Navarro, a UCLA alumnus, it wasn’t until he and his partner wanted to buy a house together that he realized the inconvenience he faces not being able to marry his partner of eight years.
Despite being in a domestic partnership, he said not being able to marry his partner Ben Liang, also a UCLA alumnus, has caused them various setbacks. A domestic partnership is a relationship between two individuals living together, but not legally joined in a civil union. They are able to attain certain health care benefits and other protections.
“Now that we’re buying property, I’m seeing how hard it is,” Navarro said. “One of us is going to buy the home, then when we’re done with escrow, we have to add the other person, and after, only one of us can get the tax benefits from it.”
Navarro met Liang when they were both undergraduates at UCLA and got to know him through UniCamp, in which they are both still very much active.
Navarro said that, had same-sex marriage been legal, he and Liang would definitely have been married by now.
Navarro said he thinks it’s unfair that the direct benefits of marriages, like tax benefits, are denied to him.
“We’ll both be making good money and paying into the system, but yet we’ll never benefit from the tax system,” he said. “Both of us are good people, hard workers, we donate money, but yet we’re denied the same advantages as heterosexual couples.”
The couple hopes to adopt a child in the future, but Navarro said the process is going to be harder for them because their relationship doesn’t coincide with “normal family dynamics.”
Again, he said the tax system will penalize them since they will both be helping to support the child, but only one will be able to take the child as a tax deduction.
But what bothers Navarro the most is that same-sex couples have to utilize various resources, such as seeking legal advice or writing wills, to ensure they have decision-making rights for each other – rights that heterosexual married couples automatically receive.
“We are educated and have resources, but not every gay couple has that,” Navarro said. “As a gay couple in this country, we have to leverage a lot more resources to protect our rights.”
But even if they utilize these resources, Navarro said there are some benefits they can never tap into.
Navarro’s mother has been receiving survivor benefits through social security since her husband died, but if something happens to Navarro or his partner, neither of them would be entitled to benefits.
“All the tax money we put into the system would not go to me,” he said.
But Navarro said he recognizes the benefits he has living in a liberal state such as California. He receives state domestic partnership benefits such as the right to make medical decisions for Liang.
For Thomas Pier, an oncology social worker at UCLA Center of Integrative Oncology, marrying his partner of 16 years would be the ideal situation. He met his partner when he was volunteering abroad. The two have a domestic partnership, but said they hope to marry someday if legislation is passed.
“I really look at the agreement of marriage to be both full of rights and full of responsibilities,” Pier said. “It’s not only the expectation that we’d get something out of it, but it’s a way for gay and lesbian people to give back to society, to be stable couples in our society, and I think that benefits society as a whole.”
Pier said he grew up in a large family where all his brothers and sisters wanted to grow up and find a husband or wife and commit themselves to marriage.
“I, from a very early age, felt that I could never have that,” Pier said. “That doesn’t give us an equal chance to have a stable relationship.”
The importance of allowing same-sex marriage is twofold for Pier: the rights a married couple receives and a way to properly define a relationship.
“I have gay friends who are in relationships ““ we say partner, lover, all kinds of different things and it can be muddy, not as clear,” Pier said. “When a person’s dating, they’re girlfriend, boyfriend, when they are engaged, they’re called a fiance, when they’re married they’re husband and wife ““ it provides a way to clearly define yourself.”
Pier said he understands and respects the rights of private and religious institutions to define marriage, and doesn’t expect to be allowed to get married in a church. But he does want a civil marriage, which could be done in a courthouse. This would have nothing to do with the church, he said, but would provide gay and lesbian couples the title and everything else that comes along with being married.
It is the small inconveniences of not being recognized as a married couple that sometimes get to Pier. He said when he was traveling internationally with his partner, the workers in customs wouldn’t let the two go through together. Each had to go through different agents in customs, where one went really fast and the other took an hour.
“It was a minor thing, but it was pretty striking to us,” Pier said.
Allegretto has faced similar inconveniences. She said she and her partner would have been married by now had they been able to.
She said she wants the same recognition and rights that married heterosexual couples receive.
Allegretto and her partner bought a house together, but said that if something were to happen to either one of them, the other would not be able to simply transfer the estate to their name without paying taxes.
“That just seems unfair to me,” she said. “I think most of us, we feel like we’re equal to everyone else in this country.”