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Lane Hudson, co-founder of D.C. For Marriage, said he expects Congress would try to overturn a gay marriage law in D.C. and joined more established activist groups in calling for expansion of the city’s domestic partnership law.(Blade photo by Joey DiGuglielmo)
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HOME > NEWS > LOCAL
By: LOU CHIBBARO J COMMENTS
 
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Elections and Ethics to place on the ballot an initiative calling for banning same-sex marriage in the city. The organizers later withdrew the initiative.
Baker said the foundation commissioned the nationally known survey research firm Celinda Lake to conduct a poll to determine whether an anti-gay marriage initiative could pass in the District. Baker and other leaders of the foundation have declined to disclose the poll’s findings.
At last week’s forum, Baker would only say that some of the poll findings were “encouraging and some not,” with black voters surfacing as an “issue” to be concerned about.
Past polling data for D.C. have shown that a sizable portion of the black voters, while liberal and progressive on many issues, hold strong religious beliefs and conservative views on social issues. Some of the city’s black Baptist ministers, for example, have been among the leaders of the national effort to pass a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
Local activist Bob Summersgill, who has led efforts to expand the city’s domestic partners law on behalf of the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance, gave a slide presentation at the forum showing that recent additions to the law offer domestic partners nearly all of the rights, benefits, and obligations that married couples enjoy under the city’s marriage law.
Inheritance and property rights, child custody and alimony provisions, tax deductions, and a wide range of other rights and benefits are now available to domestic partners who choose to register their relationships with the city, Summersgill said. He said the expanded provisions came through 11 separate bills enacted by the D.C. Council since the Council passed the city’s first domestic partners law in 1992.
Congress quickly stepped in to prohibit the city from spending any of its funds to implement the 1992 law, effectively putting it on hold until 2001, when it agreed to allow the city to finally put the law into effect. The 1992 law, the Health Care Benefits Expansion Act, was limited to providing health insurance benefits to domestic partners of city government employees — only if the employees paid 100 percent of the monthly premiums.
The law allowed all domestic partners, not just city government workers, to register their relationships with the city, providing official city recognition, something considered a bold step at the time. Aside from allowing hospital visitation privileges, the 1992 law provided no other benefits or rights to domestic partners who were not employed by the city.
Summersgill said the law has been expanded dramatically since that time, with the city expected put the finishing touches on its incremental approach to broadening the domestic partners law in 2008.
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