The Seattle Post Intelligencer is reporting that Washington State is heading toward establishing a civil union status for gays and lesbians, as the governor has promised to sign the legislation that has already been approved by the legislature.
Gays and lesbians can’t legally wed, but the Legislature took another step toward that Tuesday by passing domestic partnership legislation for same-sex couples.
“It’s not marriage,” said Rep. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle. “There are more than 400 state law rights or obligations that don’t come with domestic partnership, and we are going to have our hands full trying to get those rights and protections, too.
“It’s a really important first step in providing some first protections for same-sex couples and their families as well as senior citizens who haven’t married and can’t afford to do so for various reasons.”
The bill passed easily on a 63-35 House vote despite condemnations from conservatives who said the bill was an affront to community values and religious freedom.
Gov. Chris Gregoire plans to sign the bill, which earlier passed the Senate, into law. Senate Bill 5336 creates a domestic partnership registry with the state and provides enhanced rights for same-sex couples, including hospital visitation, the ability to authorize autopsies and organ donations, and inheritance rights when there is no will.
With the homosexual lifestyle now enjoying near universal approval among cultural elites, there is now rapidly increasing pressure to integrate this approval of homosexual relationships into the law. The most logical place for this to occur is liberal blue states in the North East and West Coast, where, like Europe, traditional moral and religious values have little cultural respect. Gay marriage has been officially sanctioned in Massachusetts under the command of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Same-sex civil unions (i.e. gay marriage lite) have been implemented in New Jersey and Vermont under orders from their respective Supreme Courts. Civil unions have also already been implemented in the state of Connecticut after being approved by the legislative process. Now two more states are on the brink of legislatively implementing civil unions. Approval of legislation in Washington state now looks inevitable as the Governor has promised to sign the legislation. It also appears as if civil unions will be approved in New Hampshire although the Governor has not yet taken a position on the issue.
Unless there is some major disruption of current trends, it is likely that every single state in the North East and West Coast will have state laws that officially sanction gay civil unions within five years, and most of these laws will be implemented through the legislative process without intervention of the Courts. It is also likely that within ten years there will be laws approving same-sex marriage in every single state in the North East and West Coast. The reason is that there is an underlying principle, which is driving approval of these civil unions, which is that from an ethical standpoint, heterosexual relationships are no better than homosexual relationships. The necessary logical implication of such a principle is that the law should not accord and special status to heterosexual relationships because such special status discriminates against homosexual relationships.
However, it is impossible to gain immediate approval for full fledged same-sex marriage because people are slow in giving up traditions. Marriage has been defined as being between a man and a woman for a long time, and it takes time for people to be willing to accept the full implications of gay equality. So instead, gay equality is a process of increasing legitimacy. The first step in the process was to make gay people a normal and accepted part of the culture by making them lovable characters on TV shows. The second step in the process was to remove the seemingly worst badges of discrimination by eliminating laws that criminalize homosexual relationships and implementing laws that prohibit discrimination in the private sector. The third step is to create gay marriage lite (i.e. civil unions) by giving gays and lesbians the same rights as married people without the title of marriage. The fourth step in the process is to recognize that same-sex couples have the same rights to marriage and anything else as heterosexual couples. The principle of gay equality justified full recognition of gay marriage from the beginning, but the process has to be incremental in order for people to be able to accept the full implications of the principle.
The Blue States are just entering stage three in that they are beginning to recognize same sex unions. This stage will be completed within five years. Then will come stage four, which is full equality. There will probably be full approval for gay marriage in Blue States in less than ten years from now. However, it is possible that the approval could be more widespread than Blue States. As the U.S. Supreme Court stands right now, there are five supporters of gay rights on the Court. Four justices on the Court would probably require recognition of gay marriage today if it came up for a vote in the Supreme Court because they all already understand the full implications of the gay equality principle.
Justice Kennedy does not understand the full implications of the gay equality principle, and he is basically following the stages that the culture is following (although he is on a slightly faster pace because he is more influenced by cultural elites where there is universal approval of homosexuality). Basically, by the end of the 1990s, Justice Kennedy was at stage two in his acceptance of the implications of the gay equality principle. See Romer v. Evans; Lawrence v. Texas. This means that Justice Kennedy could easily be heading into either stage three (civil unions) or four (gay marriage) within the next five to ten years. Therefore, if the Supreme Court does not change ideologically in the next five to ten years in a more conservative direction, there will probably be a requirement for either gay civil unions or gay marriage found in the constitution. By then, there will be probably fifteen to twenty states with civil unions or gay marriage already in place, and the Supreme Court would cite that as evidence of a cultural shift that the Supreme Court must somehow recognize in its jurisprudence, just as the Supreme Court cited the decline in sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas to justify striking them down.
(Steve Trask)
