This past fall, the Alaska Supreme Court unanimously decided that the state was violating the Equal Protection Clause of our constitution by denying health insurance and other job benefits to the life partners and children of gay state employees. In other words, the court found that since gay people cannot legally marry, we need alternative access to the same civil rights and benefits that others enjoy via a marriage contract.
This fight is not directly about gay marriage, but about equal rights. In 1998, Alaska voters passed a constitutional gay marriage ban. Article I, Section 25 of our constitution now says: "To be valid or recognized in this State, a marriage may exist only between one man and one woman." This new resolution would add the following text:
"No other union is similarly situated to a marriage between a man and a woman and, therefore, a marriage between a man and a woman is the only union that shall be valid or recognized in the State and to which the rights, benefits, obligations, qualities, or effects of marriage shall be extended or assigned."
Marriage conveys more than 1,050 federal rights and responsibilities such as joint ownership/inheritance of property, hospital visitation rights, immigration rights, spousal health insurance, Social Security and retirement benefits. If gay people cannot get married, shall we be denied these 1000-plus basic rights? In fact, this is happening right now in America. Gay people routinely lose their homes (homes in their partners' names), are barred by blood-family from visiting their life partner on their deathbed, and are denied health insurance protection for their partner and their (partner's) children.
Have we not yet learned that discrimination is wrong and that all Americans deserve equal rights? While Senator Ralph Seekins has yet to explain or justify his support and introduction of this discriminatory amendment (Senate Joint Resolution 20), he says that the Alaskan people deserve to vote on this issue. He says they deserve to clarify whether they intended only to ban gay marriage in 1998 or if they also intended to deny equal rights to gay Alaskans. Unfortunately the racist Jim Crow laws of our recent history were popular with a majority of voters. Should we allow a popular vote to send us backwards into a new chapter of Jim Crow?
While the constitutional amendment is intended to discriminate against gay Alaskans, it will also harm thousands of heterosexual families and their children. Thank goodness we do not have the overt racism of the 1950s, but we also do not have the same family structures. Life is not as simple as it used to be and many Alaskan couples wait or choose not to get married, or they are divorced have children and are living with new partners. These families will be denied health insurance and other protections for their families. As evidence of the social complexity of modern life, many gay people have children. The radical backers of this constitutional amendment will deny health insurance and legal protections to Alaskan children because they hate their gay parents.
A majority of Fortune 500 companies offer domestic partner benefits to attract the best employees. These companies include Alaska Airlines, AT&T, BP America, Coca Cola, Eastman Kodak, Ford Motor Company, Home Depot, IBM, Intel, Johnson and Johnson, Microsoft, Motorola, Nike, Sears, and Wells Fargo. If America's best companies offer domestic partner benefits, why would we outlaw them in Alaska? This discriminatory amendment will be bad for Alaska's businesses and institutions especially in our tourism, health care, retailing, education, government, social service, and transportation industries.
