Why Do Same-Sex Couples Want to Marry?

By Melissa Price

The other night, I heard a comedian on TV joking about gay marriage. “I’m all for it,” he said. “Why shouldn’t gay people be as miserable as the rest of us?”

In reality, the ideal reason people want to get married is because they love each other. They want to honor their commitment some want to have families and all want to participate in the American dream. Certainly in the land of the free, we are free to love whomever we wish. So why do we want to get married? Exactly what is all this fuss about gay marriage and why is it so important?

Providing legal protection for children in the context of the safety of family and maintaining the integrity of that family are two very important reasons.

Marriage guarantees certain civil rights and, for gay couples, it allows for basic human equality under the law. Imagine you have been summoned to the local hospital because your husband has fallen ill. You drop everything and flee to the ER, but once you get there, you’re prohibited from visiting him, and even worse, you’re not allowed to make crucial medical decisions on his behalf. Most of us can’t conceive of being so helpless where our loved ones are concerned. Yet a gay couple, that has been together even for decades, is denied that automatic basic legal protection.

The fact is that gay people lack equality in areas that many heterosexual couples take for granted. For example, a married person automatically inherits the property of her deceased spouse without paying estate tax. A gay life partner in this same situation is forced to pay estate tax on the inherited property. Similarly, a married person is permitted to roll over a deceased spouse’s 401(k) funds into an IRA without paying tax, but not so for gays who inherit each other’s 401(k) plans. For that privilege, gay Americans pay up to a whopping 70%. And forget pensions, since most pension plans only pay survivor benefits to legal spouses, thereby automatically excluding gays.

While Civil Unions afford legal protection and rights to gay couples at the state level, those rights exist only in that state, whereas all states and the federal government recognize married couples. Civil unions do not provide the nearly 1,000 federal benefits and protections afforded to married couples safety nets that those with civil unions will never see.

Consider the situation of a married senior couple in which the husband or wife must move into a nursing home. Under the law, the spouse who remains in the family home is legally protected from being forced to sell the home in order to pay the nursing home bills. But an elderly gay couple in that same situation does not have such protection. To make matters worse, even though they contributed to payroll taxes during their working years, gays are not entitled to a deceased partner’s Social Security benefits. This alone results in an annual income loss of about $5,500. So if they have had no protections and have lost their home in order to pay off the medical bills of the deceased, these loving and devoted partners stand to lose their own security just when they need it most.

In their fight for equality, gays, like those who struggled through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, still face many uphill battles. But, equality under the law, respect, love, and protection for their families are the fundamental reasons that gay people seek the right to marry.

In June, when California’s State Supreme Court struck down discrimination and ruled in favor of gay marriage, one of the first couples to get married were two women who’d been together for 55 devoted years. Fifty-five years of the same ups and downs that all couples have, but with the added challenges of decades of homophobia and discrimination. While straight couples reap respect and admiration upon reaching such a milestone, on their “emerald” anniversary, this couple didn’t celebrate with an anniversary party, but a wedding reception.

Before gay marriage was recognized, a 20-something heterosexual couple married for just five minutes had more legal rights than those two devoted women, whose partnership had endured for more than a half century.