Dec 10, 2004  |  By: CHRIS CRAIN  | COMMENTS     

worth the backdoor effort. There are other ways of expanding health benefits that do not have the same deleterious side effect on marriage.

In some sense, civil marriage is as much about divorce as it is about some government head-nod of recognition. Historically, one spouse (the wife) played a home-and-hearth supportive role for the breadwinning spouse (the husband). Marriage laws protected the wife from economic ruin if the husband dissolved the marriage.

Even today, when gender roles are much more relaxed, there’s rarely true financial or professional parity within heterosexual or homosexual couples. Without marriage laws, the disadvantaged partner in a gay relationship is invariably the loser when the relationship ends.

And where children are involved, the story becomes even more tragic. The pages of this newspaper have been filled far too many times with stories about couples, usually lesbians, who break up, and the biological mother cynically uses discriminatory marriage and custody laws to deprive the non-biological mother and her child from continuing their relationship.

Add in financial disparity and children and the equation is even worse, as the gay parent with custody can’t compel support from the non-custodial parent.
However as much as we may like the idea of domestic partnership benefits and civil unions, they are not worth undermining marriage and the protection civil marriage laws offer couples and their children.

D.P. benefits and civil unions are only worthy goals if they are limited to gay couples and recognized as interim measures, to be dissolved on that happy day when we all can walk down that aisle.