Gay Couples Face Extra Financial Challenges
It may pay to get married, but not everyone has that option. The Human Rights Campaign, a civil rights organization for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered, launched a campaign this week to bring attention to the financial challenges that same-sex couples are forced to deal with. The group points out that gay and lesbian couples lack the protection and benefits conferred by over 1,000 different federal provisions.
Among the disadvantages that gay couples face compared with legally married ones:
- Unmarried couples often cannot include each other on employer-based health plans without paying tax penalties.
- They often lack job protection when taking time off to care for their partner.
- They can not give Social Security survivor benefits to their partner.
The campaign offers more information and tips for dealing with such challenges.
Tags: civil rights | marriage
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Reader Comments
We need our civil rights!
It's time that this great country of ours grants parity and civil liberties to gays and lesbians by allowing us to marry and to get all the benefits that heterosexual couples take for granted. It is our human right, our civil right and our moral right. Thank you to all the good people who support our plight.
More special rights for Gays
Gays have the same rights that I do. Namely the right to marry one person of the opposite sex. What they want is a special right. Why not complain that we can't marry 15 other people at once? Isn't that a violation of our rights? Just more whining for special rights.
Financial and other burdens faced by gays
Special rights, Mr. Bar? Many gay couples have been together, faithfully, for decades, have raised families together, shared their hopes and dreams, plan to be together "til death us do part". Yet -- after 9/11 partners of gay police and firefighters who lost their lives there had to suffer the additional pain of losing all these couples had built together, and could not secure survivors' benefits; gays have also fought and often died in every war America has waged. Yet virtually every right and responsibility afforded heterosexual couples has to be bitterly fought for by our families, at great cost in terms of legal fees and emotional stress - with no guarantee that our wills, health care proxies, partnership agreements, or dying wishes will ever be recognized or respected. You have go through discrimination to really understand how heartbreaking and impoverishing it can be. It isn't fair, it isn't just. It has to change. There is no defensible reason why our families should have to remain second class, treated with such obscene disrespect. Some of us are old enough to have worked in the civil rights movement back in the 50's and 60's. We understood then, as people should understand now, that we are not a free nation if there remains a group of citizens, who work hard and pay taxes and raise families who are not welcomed into the embrace of the constitutional guarantees that everyone else enjoys. This is not "special" treatment, Thomas, it is EQUAL treatment.
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