For instance:
Friends of mine that have been together for close to twenty years recently had a death in their family. They work together at a large company that delivers packages and they do not drive brown trucks. I will call them Driver A and Driver B for this story.
Driver A's father has been ill for a long time and sadly he died last Tuesday. Driver A was given bereavement leave to go home to bury her father. Driver B was told she was not entitled to any leave at all.
Driver B called the human resource department of said package delivery company and was told that as only a domestic partner she was not entitled to any leave at all. If she was married then the father of her partner of nearly twenty years would be considered family and she would be entitled to leave or if she lived in San Francisco and worked for the company there she would be entitled to mourn the death of this man.
Turns out Driver B had to beg and plead for the delivery company to get someone to cover her shift on Friday so that she could get up at the crack of dawn and drive for hours to attend the funeral of the father of her partner.
So tell me again how domestic partnership gives us all the rights we need.
2 comments:
How very sad for both of our friends.
This is probably one of the more common discrepancy issues between being married and D.P. but there are many...hospital visitation, estate issues, pensions, etc., etc.
Shame on that delivery company, not the brown one, for not doing the right thing. (And we all know how many of our gay bros and sista's work for this company!)Jeanne - forgot my gmail password.
As I creep up on my 8th wedding anniversary, I remain completely baffled by the argument that gay marriage would somehow "damage" mine. In fact, I feel that my marriage is weaker because it is a legal protection to which I am entitled while others are not. I feel like I am discriminating. Like belonging to a sexist country club or something. I get really annoyed when unmarried het friends pooh-pooh marriage, especially the ones who have kids with someone they never married. I feel like they are leaving their children unprotected. Like not having life insurance when you are eligible and can afford it. No one with half a brain should do this to people they love: deny them protections that the law ought to extend to every person. Anyway, I got to actually make the argument to a family member the other day that gay marriage would have saved my parents marriage. If it had been legal when they married, they might both have been able to marry people they loved for the rest of their lives.
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