As seen in an AP story:
A lawyer for eight gay couples argued in court Tuesday that Connecticut’s marriage laws illegally create a separate class of people based on sexual orientation.
The couples, with the help of the Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, sued in 2004 in an attempt to overturn the state’s ban on gay marriage.[...]
That law “is nothing less than the government’s announcement that these are second-class citizens,” Ben Klein, a senior attorney for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, told Superior Court Judge Patty Jenkins Pittman.
GLAD used a similar argument in Massachusetts, where gay marriage became legal after a 2003 state Supreme Judicial Court ruling, and similar lawsuits are pending in other states. In January, a Baltimore judge ruled that a law against gay marriage violates the Maryland Constitution’s guarantee of equal rights.
Connecticut Assistant Attorney General Jane Rosenberg defended the laws Tuesday, arguing that there is no fundamental right to marry.
She said it was reasonable for the state to create civil unions to give gay couples the legal rights of marriage while also dealing with administrative issues, such as federal Medicaid and Medicare programs, which do not recognize gay marriage.
This logic, of course, misses two obvious considerations:
- It could be that limiting federal programs to opposite-gender unions poses the same equal-rights issues as does prohibiting same-gender marriages; or
- Given that so many folks have different views of what constitutes a marriage, perhaps the state should get out of the marriage business. Recognize civil unions, or other constructs that prepackage rights, privileges, and responsibilities among different forms of family units, and leave the term “marriage” to the definitional whims of society and religion.