Forum explores the long path to marriage equality in N.Y.

Over 70 people from different parts of Long Island gathered at the United Church of Rockville Centre late last month to hear the stories of seven lesbian and gay couples, and to learn why marriage equality is important to them. Marriage equality is the inclusion of same-sex couples in the full legal rights of marriage that heterosexual couples enjoy.

Each of the couples at the church that night has been together between 10 and 37 years, and most of them have been raising children. One couple after another described their frustration in dealing with hospitals, schools and work, where there is often little understanding of two-moms or two-dads households, despite legal documents attesting to their maternity, paternity or legal adoption.

Jon and Robert Cooper took the prize for having the most children, with five, including a set of twins. Several couples have been married in Massachusetts, Connecticut or California, where it was legal, and their marriages there have been recognized as legally binding and valid in New York by executive order of Gov. David Paterson.

Despite that, their many stories attested to the difficulty receiving proper medical care either for their spouses or their children because they don’t fit the typical construct of marriage.

Andrew Zwerin of Rockville Centre described his frustration at being told he could not sign releases at the hospital for his husband, Jeff Friedman, when Jeff had a heart attack, because hospital staff did recognize the legal documents attesting to their relationship. Likewise, when their 6-year old son, Joshua, had to be treated for asthma, his treatment was delayed for eight hours while the hospital decided how to proceed.

Two couples have chosen not to get married out of state because they want their own state to acknowledge the legitimacy of their vows of love and commitment as just as legally binding as other couples enjoy.

“When all is said and done,” the Rev. Dr. Ruby Wilson said to her partner, the Rev. Lisa Robinson, “I love you—that’s why I want to get married.”

Friedman, president of Marriage Equality New York, PAC, and Zwerin detailed the slowly developing political change in Albany where for three years, the Assembly has supported a Marriage Equality bill, only to be stopped by the Senate.

Jon Cooper, Suffolk County legislator of Huntington since 2000, married his spouse, Robert, in Connecticut and affirmed his belief that a full Marriage Equality bill will be passed in 2011. Other speakers saw the process of judicial appeal now going on in California as another path through which Marriage Equality may attain nation-wide legalization. (California had declared same-sex marriages valid until it was overturned by referendum of Proposition 8; that referendum is itself under judicial review on the Circuit Court level, and a decision is expected soon. Whatever that decision is, it is expected that there will be an appeal taken to the U.S. Supreme Court.)

One person compared the process of Marriage Equality for lesbian and gay people to the process by which all laws against inter-racial marriage were overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967, in Loving vs. Virginia.

“Whether it's through legislation or the courts, it’s just a matter of time,” said Robert Powers, president of the Malverne Historical Society, who married his partner, Howard Costa in 2008. Their marriage was celebrated in a religious ceremony at the United Church of Rockville Centre last summer.