The ACLU's lawsuit has the potential to set a larger precedent, said Equality Pennsylvania President Adrian Shanker.
Ed Hill, 67, and David Palmer, 65, are like other senior citizens on a fixed income, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
But the retired Upper Mount Bethel Township residents have the added burden of living in a state where their marriage is unrecognized, throwing into uncertainty everything from health care costs to taxes and Social Security benefits.
The Northampton County couple is among 23 plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU today in Harrisburg seeking to overturn a Pennsylvania law that prevents gay couples from getting married.
“We don’t want to leave our home and community,” Palmer said in a statement from the ACLU. He was director of exhibitions at a museum and also ran a bed and breakfast from 1996 until five years ago with Hill, a veteran of the U.S. Navy who served in Vietnam then spent most of his career at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“This is where we met 25 years ago, and this is where we want to grow old together,” Palmer said.
The suit challenges Pennsylvania’s ban on gay marriage but it has the potential to set a larger precedent because it invokes the equal protection clause of the Constitution that prohibits states from denying equal protection for residents, said Adrian Shanker, president of Equality Pennsylvania.
“This case could have a really big impact on our lives,” said Shanker, of Bethlehem.
Following DOMA decision
Filed by the ACLU, its Pennsylvania chapter and volunteer counsel, the lawsuit comes on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, and Shanker says it comes at the right time. He noted plans to introduce marriage equality legislation in Harrisburg.
New Jersey is also a battleground for same-sex marriage. The gay rights group Lambda Legal is relying on the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act provision in a state lawsuit to force New Jersey to allow same-sex couples to wed. In that case, the new argument is that the New Jersey Constitution does not allow the state to essentially keep same-sex couples from receiving federal benefits by prohibiting them from marrying.
The civil rights lawyers suing in Pennsylvania said they filed the first known legal challenge to overturn the state law effectively banning same-sex marriage. Pennsylvania is the only northeastern state that doesn’t allow it or civil unions.
The lawsuit names Gov. Tom Corbett, Attorney General Kathleen Kane and three other officials. The plaintiffs are one widow, 10 couples and one of the couples’ two teenage daughters, and they include four couples who were legally married in other states but whose marriages go unrecognized by the state of Pennsylvania.
Seeking legal protections
Pennsylvania would become the 14th state to legalize gay marriage if the lawsuit is successful. It also would force the state to recognize the legal marriages of all same-sex couples in other jurisdictions.
The plaintiffs, some of whom spoke during a news conference in the state Capitol after the lawsuit was filed, said their willingness to join was driven partly by a desire to have the same legal and financial protections afforded to opposite-sex couples, but mostly by the emotional satisfaction of seeking social justice.
The governor’s and attorney general’s offices would only say today they are reviewing the lawsuit.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs said banning gay marriage satisfies no legitimate government or child welfare concerns of the state, since Pennsylvania judges routinely grant adoptions to same-sex couples that are viewed as in the best interest of the child.
“It serves only to disparage and injure lesbian and gay couples and their families,” the lawsuit says.
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PATCHWORK OF LAWS
Same-sex marriage is legal, or soon will be, in 13 states and the District of Columbia, representing about 30 percent of the U.S. population. Pennsylvania excluded, every state in the northeastern United States allows same-sex marriage except New Jersey, which allows civil unions.
A 1996 Pennsylvania law defines marriage as a civil contract in which a man and a woman take each other as husband and wife, and it says same-sex marriages, even if entered legally elsewhere, are void in Pennsylvania. State law does not allow civil unions.