Gays Rally Support for Right to Marry

Gary Reisch and Charles Goldman of Sherman Oaks know that if they were allowed by law to marry, they would enjoy certain benefits: tax breaks, joint health coverage, inheritance rights and hospital visitation privileges.

But those advantages are secondary to the real reason the two men wish they could legally register their 8-year-old relationship, which was sanctioned in a Jewish ceremony five years ago.

“We think we should have the same rights and the same obligations as any couple that wants to marry,” said Reisch, a 33-year-old small-business owner. “We’re talking about discrimination.”

In California and the nation Thursday, same-gender couples and their supporters turned out for the first national Freedom to Marry Day.

In West Hollywood, activists held a breakfast with supportive religious leaders and tied hundreds of lavender ribbons around trees, lampposts and street signs--a symbolic “tying of the knot.”

Atlanta-area activists held a wedding cake celebration. In Kansas City, Mo., gays and lesbians caravaned in cars marked “Just Married.” Proclamations were issued and news conferences were held in San Francisco and New York City. And Montana gay-rights supporters kicked off a statewide letter-to-the-editor campaign to educate the public.

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The actions were partly to support efforts in the fight to legalize same-sex marriages and partly to try to stave off setbacks.

In Hawaii, a same-sex marriage case is on appeal to the state’s Supreme Court. Legislators, hoping to derail that explosive case, forged an unprecedented compromise bill allowing couples to register as “reciprocal beneficiaries.” That designation allows registrants to qualify for benefits usually reserved for married couples. Among other things, they can obtain family medical insurance and file domestic violence complaints.

Similar smaller-scale measures are spreading. A survey last year by the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick found that nationally, nearly a quarter of employers with more than 5,000 workers extended health benefits to domestic partners--straight or gay.

However, even as Hawaii was supporting domestic partnership rules, its legislature approved a companion bill that will put a constitutional amendment before voters allowing the legislature to recognize only marriages between the sexes.

At the federal level, President Clinton in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which would allow states to disregard gay and lesbian marriages performed in other states.

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In West Hollywood, couples came for the kind of recognition they cannot get elsewhere. They brought “wedding” albums, full of glossy pictures of events sanctioned only by each other, and wore plaintive name tags, such as “Gary and Charles, eight years waiting to marry.”

And they told their stories.

Pat Alford-Keating, a 43-year-old UCLA psychologist, recalled breathing a sigh of relief when her two children turned 18. It meant that if anything happened to her, her son and daughter couldn’t be taken away from her long-time partner, Shannon Keating, the woman the children call “Mommy.”

Now, there are different worries: Suppose she or her partner were hospitalized in grave condition?

“There’s always the fear that some family members would come in in the eleventh hour and say, ‘No, she means nothing to her, she has no rights--I’m the family member here,’ ” Alford-Keating said.

“Our country is built on the right to the pursuit of happiness,” she said. “What could be more central to the pursuit of happiness than finding your true love and getting married?”