Close and Committed: A Brief History of Domestic Partnerships
by Alana Pipe
Domestic partnership is an important institution that is going extinct in America. It grants fewer rights and imposes fewer responsibilities than marriage. In the nineties, the limitations of domestic partnership limited its appeal while it was the highest form of union for same sex couples, who were at that time barred from marrying. The exclusivity of marriage made domestic partnership look like a weak alternative for same-sex couples. Now that marriage is more open, the carefully measured rights and limitations of domestic partnership pose a practical and pragmatic alternative for couples.
“The term family,” declared Associate Justice Vito Titone in July of 1989, “should not be rigidly restricted to those people who have formalized their relationship by obtaining, for instance, a marriage certificate or an adoption order.” These words heralded a new kind of union in New York City, when a man named Miguel Baraschi lost his partner of ten years to AIDS, and was suddenly evicted from the rent-controlled apartment he had shared with him. There being no institution to formally recognize their relationship, he had no documented right to continue living in his own apartment. Forced out, Baraschi took his case to court. The case went to the Court of Appeals, and he won, the court ruling that “the intended protection against sudden eviction should not rest on fictitious legal distinctions or genetic history, but instead should find its foundation in the reality of family life.” For the first time, same-sex couples who had lived together for ten years or more were legally considered a family under New York City’s rent-control regulations.
One week after Baraschi won his case Mayor Ed Koch issued an executive order. Young men and women were dying in unprecedented numbers from AIDS, and Koch granted hospital visitation rights and four days of paid bereavement leave to city employees and their registered domestic partners. “This has nothing to do with gay rights,” Koch said, as he issued an order that broadly expanded rights to non-married couples. “The largest number of people eligible will be heterosexuals living together as couples but not married, elderly people living with companions, people who have a domestic relationship but not necessarily sexual relations.” Though it arose from the era of AIDS, domestic partnership had to be presented carefully for broader appeal to conservative voters.
In 1993, Mayor David Dinkins codified domestic partnership in New York, and after a three-year lawsuit and lengthy negotiations finally agreed to expand health benefits of city employees to their domestic partners, creating a registry at the City Clerk’s office that was for the first time open to both heterosexual and same-sex couples. At that time, 70 percent of registrants were same-sex couples. In 1997, when Rudy Giuliani was running for re-election, he promised to sign domestic partnership rights into law. When the legislation passed in 1998, 8,700 couples registered as domestic partners; over 55 percent of those couples were heterosexual, and fewer than 45 percent were same-sex couples. Giuliani remarked: “This landmark legislation represents a logical step forward in ensuring that those couples who choose to live in economically dependent and committed relationships continue to receive these important rights, benefits and protections and equal treatment under the law.”
Twenty-five years later, my boyfriend and I stood outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall at 7:45 in the morning, joining a line that wrapped around the corner and halfway down the block. We had come to register as domestic partners after three years together. While I’ve never referred to Edmund as my Registered Domestic Partner when I introduce him to people, I can’t deny my excitement at having our relationship officially acknowledged. It was the practical benefits that swayed us toward domestic partnership: Edmund gained access to my health insurance, which would have otherwise been unaffordable, even through Obamacare. We also gained family status in New York hospitals. With my own relatives thousands of miles away, having Edmund as a legally recognized member of my family made sense in case of emergency.
These unions have existed around the country for years, helping thousands of couples secure legal rights without getting married. Today, in New York City, a domestic partnership is a legally recognized status for people in a close and committed personal relationship involving shared responsibilities. To enter a domestic partnership, both parties must be at least 18, unrelated by blood, living together “on a continuous basis,” and be unmarried. This legal status was the created by the city as a means to gain legal protection without opting for marriage. Same-sex couples were instrumental in creating this alternative institution, as marriage was not an option open to them. Identifying this as an infringement of rights, and not wanting to rock the boat, the city presented domestic partnerships as a type of union that would benefit all types of couples, regardless of sexual orientation.
Following the legalization of same sex-marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, the future of domestic partnership in New York City remains unclear. Domestic partnerships and civil unions have been steadily phased out in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Delaware, and Rhode Island. Vermont stopped offering civil union status in 2009, when the state began offering same-sex marriage, though pre-existing civil union status is still honored. While about a third of the workplaces in New York offer benefits to domestic partners, many corporate employers are rescinding the benefits formerly granted to domestic partners. IBM, Delta Airlines, Verizon, and several major universities that formerly conferred benefits to domestic partners have replaced them with spousal benefits.
Marriage can’t be the only standard of commitment in the eyes of government. Marriage has been problematic in the recent past, to women and to the LGBTQ community. The fact that marriage may be is required to gain health benefits in workplaces or to gain visitation rights in hospitals forces some people to make religiously loaded choices to be treated equally. It extends a rigid tradition of family to same-sex couples. Domestic partnership is a way around the tradition of marriage, and family, which has been frighteningly slow to change. We are losing a means of validating families, as domestic partnership is phased out by states and employers. In the past, people who could not, or wished to officialize family setup with a marriage had a means of gaining rights. As it was ruled in 1989, protection of these people’s family rights “should not rest on fictitious legal distinctions or genetic history, but instead should find its foundation in the reality of family life.” In 2016, in New York, the reality of family life does not always coincide with marriage. The rate of marriage for millennial Americans is lower than it has ever been amongst previous generations. The rate of marriage has dropped, particularly amongst black and hispanic millennials, and millennials without a college degree. As marriage wanes amongst these groups, so does access to healthcare. The advent of marriage equality has caused some to see domestic partnership as an obsolete institution, but perhaps it’s time for us to reconsider domestic partnership as a valid solution.
By 8:00am, the line came to life and began to move forward. We were led through a metal detector, and up a flight of stairs to the City Clerk’s Office. The fluorescent lights cast a greenish tint where a row of desks sat behind bulletproof glass. A single rose stood in a lone vase next to bunches of pens and bottles of white-out. We walked up to the window and a lady yelled for us to wait by the wall. A maze of red tape demarcated the line. Ahead of us, two women in braids and sundresses smiled and held hands. A black man in a tux stood next to a woman in a full, traditional white gown. Behind us, an elderly woman held onto an old man’s elbow. Eventually, we reached the window, where we had to enunciate through a cluster of tiny holes in plexiglass.
“Are you here for marriage or domestic partnership?”
“Domestic partnership,” we boomed into the holes.
“Have you been previously married before? Are you currently in another domestic partnership? Where were your parents born?”After answering the questions, we signed that we were living together in a close and committed personal relationship, flashed them a copy of our lease and driver’s licenses. Edmund raised his eyebrows playfully, then swiped his credit card as if he were buying a pair of socks. We were issued a bright-blue certificate in gothic script, asserting that we are domestic partners. As we left, we passed a bride admiring her own dress and saying to her friend, “You only get married once.”
“That’s not true!” yelled her mother, an older Caribbean-American woman. She linked arms with her daughter and smiled.
Photo: Flickr