Posted on 03/01/2004 12:59:48 PM PST by JesseHousman
Janice Kando is a family practice physician, an Air Force veteran and, for the past 20 years, devoted to one person.
But she and her significant other do not file a joint tax return. Kando's veteran's and Social Security benefits are not available to her partner. Managing their family finances costs them thousands of dollars more than other families pay.
That's because Kando's "other half" is another woman, Sonia P. Bettez, a social worker for most of her career and a native of Colombia. The two met when they were living in Massachusetts.
Certainly, society values the romance and stability associated with marriage, but marriage is mostly about property, judging from a study by the U.S. General Accounting Office. It found that the effect of thousands of laws and regulations, covering everything from ownership of patents to housing assistance, depends on one's marital status. To Uncle Sam, marital status continues to mean one man and one woman bound by a marriage contract in the form of a license recognized by the state. (A man and a woman living together outside of marriage face the same limitations as same-sex couples, although some states define common-law marriage status.)
The result is that many same-sex couples often find themselves paying more in taxes, insurance premiums, and legal and accounting fees than heterosexual couples in an attempt to replicate the property rights and responsibilities of marriage. Even at that, many property benefits are simply unattainable by gay and lesbian couples, said Rio Rancho attorney Lynn Perls.
Political debates kicked off by a recent Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling that same-sex partners have the right to marry have focused on concepts of family values and the sanctity of marriage. The financial question is, can the property rights and obligations of the marriage contract extend to same-sex couples?
That issue is on the table in New Mexico. The Sandoval County Clerk's Office, saying there is no clear state law that requires a marriage license to be withheld from same-sex couples, announced earlier this month it would issue licenses to gay and lesbian couples who asked for one. That practice stopped after an attorney general's opinion that same-sex marriages were indeed illegal.
For the price of a marriage license— $25 in many counties (cash only, please)— heterosexual couples automatically enjoy a wide range of legal protections.
The home they buy together under New Mexico law is automatically owned equally by each spouse. If one spouse should die, the surviving spouse's stake in the estate is automatically secured, even in the absence of a will. The value of a business established by one spouse during the marriage is also by law equally owned by the other spouse.
Accomplishing even some of this costs same-sex couples thousands of dollars.
Linda Seigle, a Santa Fe lobbyist, said she and her partner, Liz Stefanics, a Human Services Department deputy secretary, had to spend more than $2,000 to put together a trust to ensure each could inherit the other's property if either should die. Similar arrangements for heterosexual couples usually cost hundreds of dollars in fees.
Even with the trust, if Seigle, for example, names Stefanics as beneficiary of a life insurance policy, New Mexico law allows Seigle's biological family to challenge the designation, said Mike Batte, state Insurance Division chief actuary.
Same-sex couples have to deal with each other as if they were business partners, not as if they were partners in marriage, Perls said. Property earned by one member of the couple during the relationship remains that person's property in the gay relationship.
In a marriage, the property automatically becomes community property, equally owned by the man and the woman. Gay and lesbian couples must create contracts with each other "on issues that, had they been married, the law would have provided the groundwork and rules" and no lawyer would have to be involved, Perls said. That gets expensive.
"We always have an attorney and an accountant to figure out who owns what," Kando said. "There is an extra cost there." Between them, Kando and Bettez own a home and furnishings. Until recently, Bettez owned a bed-and-breakfast attached to their Corrales house.
"We had to make sure that if one of us dies, the other gets the house," Kando said.
No matter what they do, however, the usual federal estate tax shelters apply only to married couples, which means heterosexuals. The estate tax on their jointly owned property "will be sizable," Bettez said.
Kando and Bettez have wills that bequeath their property to each other. They have powers of attorney that allow one to act on behalf of the other should either become incapable of making decisions.
Despite all the costly legal work, Kando said, "I'm still not sure we're not exposed to legal interference" by their biological families.
That is a legitimate worry, Perls said. Without contracts and wills protecting the property interests of surviving gay partners, the law assumes the deceased partner's property goes to surviving children, parents or other blood relatives.
"It still happens the biological family of the deceased partner will come in and ride roughshod over the surviving partner" even when wills and contracts are in place, Perls said.
Things can get uglier if one partner is incapacitated. Even between a married heterosexual couple there can be confusion about who should decide how a patient should be treated, who should handle the patient's affairs while he is incapacitated, and who should decide if the patient should be allowed to die.
When the couple is homosexual, the problems can be worse.
Perls was approached by the biological family of an incapacitated woman who wanted guardianship of their family member. The woman's domestic partner wanted to take part in her recovery. The family "didn't understand why this roommate felt she should be involved in the disabled person's rehabilitation," Perls said.
Kando and Bettez regularly deal with a host of less earth-shaking issues. Married couples can get multi-car insurance discounts and less expensive health insurance by purchasing coverage as a family. Bettez and Kando have to buy coverage as individuals. They must file income tax returns as singles, which means a more costly accountant's fee. Even though Kando helped raise Bettez's two children, she never received the standard tax deduction couples with children claim on their joint returns.
Bettez could claim the deduction, of course, but it has less value to her since she is taxed at a lower marginal rate than is her better paid partner.
An advantage? Kando and Bettez think they may have found one advantage to being in a union not recognized by state or federal law. When Bettez sold the assets of her bed and breakfast, they became a capital gain on her income taxes. Since she has less income than Kando, the tax bite should be lower. If they filed a joint return as a married couple, they could find themselves in Kando's higher tax bracket and pay more tax on the capital gain.
"It would be nice to have one thing work to our advantage for once," Kando said.
Even here, though, heterosexual couples have an advantage. They can file jointly or separately, depending on which provides the greater tax advantage. Kando and Bettez can file only as individuals, despite their 20-year commitment to their relationship.
That figures.
What a mess!
"It still happens the biological family of the deceased partner will come in and ride roughshod over the surviving partner" even when wills and contracts are in place, Perls said.
It's hard to imagine a heterosexual riding roughshod over a surviving bull dyke.
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Is this correct? Can married couples "choose" to file separately? (Sorry for my ignorance)
However, it doesn't yet apply to perverts.
Liberals love to use the word "bash!"
To me bash means smacking someone in the face with a baseball bat.
You aren't a member of the Log Cabin Republicans are you? If so I wish you'd tell the members that they should haul their load of logs over to the DemocRAT Party where they will more easily "fit" in.
How can there be an honest appraisal of perverts who want the legal hurdles lowered so they can act like heterosexuals?
Homosexuals, their agenda and their sycophants are an abomination in this nation and need to be moved off the agenda of gentle discourse. As many might imagine, gentle discourse is impossible when confronted with the evil satanist homosexuals.
OK, so why do we give spousal benefits to married couples???? Because they had children and presumably in the past the wife (or in some cases the husband) had to stay home and take care of the kids. The stay at home spouse could not have a job, so they needed to be covered by insurance and needed social security benefits when their spouse died. In a gay relationship, there is no such dependancy. Being in a gay relationship should not entitle the partner into the same benefits, because they are presumably healthy and able to work themselves and obtain their own benefits. These benefits were created to help people be able to raise their children, not available just to sex partners.
Because this stuff is neither "sober" nor "honest." It's just propaganda. And I would venture to say it's been replicated in most major media outlets in the past couple weeks. Here in Georgia, where the legislature is debating a constitutional ban on gay marriage, yesterday's banner-headlined, front-page story in the Atlanta paper focused on the same so-called dire social inequity, but tailored for the local market.
And if a heterosexual couple choses not to have children should they be denied the benefits as if they were gay?
I have no idea. I would no more go through this latest round of sob-stories to sort out nuggets of truth than I would have gone through Pravda to learn the facts about life in the Soviet Union. If I were interested in the woes of cohabiting homosexuals (I'm not), I would wait for an expert I trust to sort this out for me.
Just like having kids. Hey, can I marry my kids and get more government benefits???
I can't believe I just typed that!
No, but when a gay man figures out how to bare children, I let him have spousal benefits.
I can't believe I just typed that!
Let me know if it works - my kids have benefits and I don't, so maybe I can get on their plan! ;-)
This is a line of crap. There are some benefits to being married, but this and a lot of the tax issues in this article is not one of them. It use to be that two single people would actually have a larger standard deduction when combined, then if they filed a joint return, now they are equal. So the standard deduction claim is BS. Also, what this idiot thinks is both should be able to claim the kids as dependants. This would actually double the benefit that a married couple would have, so again the arguement fails.
Accusing anyone who disagrees with him of homosexuality is pretty much the extent of JH's debating tactics.
I really want to know.
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