Chapter Five Gay Marriage
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The Domino Effect How Strategic Moves for Gay Rights, Singles’ Rights and Family Diversity Have Touched the Lives of Millions Memoirs of an Equal Rights Advocate by Thomas F. Coleman Spectrum Institute Press Copyright © by Thomas F. Coleman All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States ISBN 13: 978-0-9825158-0-8 www.dominoeffectbook.com Spectrum Institute P.O. Box 11030 Glendale, CA 91226 (818) 230-5156 [email protected] With gratitude to my life mate and spouse, Michael A. Vasquez, for supporting and helping me over the last three decades as I have advocated for many of the cases and causes described in this book And with appreciation to family members, friends, and colleagues, who have stood by me and worked with me since the early 1970s to achieve equal justice under law for all segments of society CONTENTS About the Author ...................................................... I Acknowledgments .............................................................. v Preface .................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Birds of a Feather ................................ 5 Young gay law students shake up the legal system Chapter Two: From Defensive to Offensive ........... 20 Ending judicial bias and police harassment are not easy tasks Chapter Three: Working with Governors .............. 41 Refocusing attention to the executive branch of government pays off Chapter Four: Redefining “Family” ........................ 70 Moving beyond tradition is necessary in a changing society Chapter Five: Gay Marriage ...................................... 97 Matrimony is personally appealing but politically questionable Chapter Six: Singles’ Rights ........................................ 120 Calling attention to the needs of single people yields mixed results Chapter Seven: Not in My Apartment ....................... 140 Successfully fighting the religious intolerance of landlords requires perseverance Chapter Eight: In Sickness and in Death ................. 152 Protecting the rights of surviving partners is emotional and challenging Chapter Nine: Employee Benefits ............................... 165 Helping unmarried heterosexuals gain equal rights meets resistance Chapter Ten: Blood Relatives ..................................... 190 Seeking equal benefits for people with biological ties is harder than expected Chapter Eleven: People with Disabilities ................ 207 The privacy rights umbrella includes people with special challenges Chapter Twelve: Teenagers ......................................... 216 A focus on policy reform shifts to battles with institutional bullies Chapter Thirteen: The Power of the Media .......... 236 Leveraging free publicity helps build public support for change Chapter Fourteen: The Domino Effect ................... 250 Early victories create precedents which have a rippling effect Chapter Fifteen: The Future ...................................... 268 The dominos will keep falling but not without resistance Epilogue ............................................................................... 279 Once an advocate, always an advocate Index ........................................................................... 284 Outtakes: Two more chapters and other images and photos are available at www.dominoefffectbook.com About the Author homas F. Coleman is a conceptual visionary. When I first met Tom in the 1970s, he was already ahead of his time, using his Textraordinary legal, political and educational skills along with his amazing perception of how the world should and could be, to help change the way people perceived "sexual minorities." He was an early advocate of a multi-disciplinary approach that included law, education, psychology, medicine and politics. He helped establish and was a driving force of such a multi- disciplinary organization known as the National Committee for Sexual Civil Liberties, which included scholars in all of those areas, and was the precursor of today's larger nationwide legal organizations. That organization early on strategized the overturning of sodomy laws throughout the nation, and began the process. He later concluded that education in this area was more appropriate under the nomenclature of privacy rights, and he helped educate elected officials, both in California and nationally, as well as the general public, about the aspect of privacy known as personal autonomy, that is, the right to be free of government interference in certain personal and private decisions about one's life and one's relationships. This shift was nothing less than revolutionary, and the gains made by the LGBT community in recent decades can be traced in large measure to that approach. i About the Author To further that shift, he established and was the engine that propelled the California Commission on Personal Privacy under Governor Jerry Brown and Los Angeles City Attorney Burt Pines. On that commission, Tom inspired the participation and hard work of some of the best minds in California, from a large range of professions and communities. When I say "inspired," I mean that he lit fires in the hearts of virtually everyone with whom he came in contact. He believed in the power of coalitions and taught that empathy toward and inclusion of others, especially under-represented minorities (from people of color to people with disabilities), was the key to establishing mutual respect among those communities and the support of the community at large. He advocated a holistic approach long before it was popular to do so. As a practicing lawyer, especially in the constitutional appellate arena, Tom was also a visionary. He often said that all three branches of government were underutilized in the movement for equal rights, and he engaged them all. For the LGBT community, he saw the first step as decriminalization, citing the difficulty in arguing for equal rights when the defining characteristic of the group is labeled a crime. His landmark constitutional ruling in the California Supreme Court, Pryor v. Municipal Court, changed the definition of "lewd conduct" in such a way that helped eliminate the criminal status of same-sex affection in many contexts and paved the way to elimination of lifetime sex-offender registration for much consenting adult behavior. In a nutshell, Tom engaged government – all three branches – and challenged communities to fashion practical solutions to problems of discrimination of many kinds, including those against families and relationships of diverse definitions, using dialogue and education rather than a stick. The objective was also to bring the law into focus with the reality of people's lives, beyond ideology, to fulfill the promise of the United States Constitution and the constitutions of the states. This is just a smattering of what can be said about Thomas F. Coleman, his integrity, courage, coalition-building and history-making vision. Jay M. Kohorn Attorney at Law Mr. Kohorn is the Assistant Director of the Los Angeles office of the California Appellate Project. ii The Domino Effect have known, loved and worked with Tom Coleman for over two decades, particularly during my years as staff attorney/legal director of ILambda Legal, and director of public policy for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. In my view, Tom's work and analysis of relationship recognition stands as an important, and often ignored, bridge between the women's rights/feminist movement and the emerging LGBT movement. He believed, as many of us did, that all relationships/families have value, and that our job as lawyers representing the LGBT "outsiders" must be dedicated to ensuring that the rights, privileges and respect for families extend not solely to those who are married - whether same-sex or opposite sex - but to all who take on the love and commitment of another person. He contributed to our structuring and understanding of emerging concepts of domestic partnership. He, in his eloquent and determined way, encouraged us to look at broader social justice goals in crafting hospital visitation policies, workplace benefits, and the full range of policies impacting on families so that the LGBT community's contribution to our social and legal understanding of family structures not be limited to protecting the rights only of those who are married, whether gay or straight. In an era in which the fight for marriage has become all consuming, it is important to note that regardless of where the marriage movement leads us, there will always be the need to ensure that those LGBT couples who choose not to marry not be left behind. Paula Ettelbrick Attorney at Law Ms. Ettelbrick is the former Legal Director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. have had the great privilege and pleasure of working with Tom Coleman since the mid 1980s when domestic partnership was still only a theory. I have argued in print that his amazing and prescient work in ICalifornia to establish domestic partnership in major cities such as Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well as his dedicated work on cases in the iii About the Author California courts laid the political groundwork that is paying off today across the country and in other parts of the world. David Link Attorney at Law Sacramento, California have known Tom Coleman since he was a law student at the dawn of the 1970s, when he evinced an interest in sexual civil liberties and I Iintroduced him to a small, early committee concerned with such issues. I have followed his career