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[tori-dobbs.livejournal.com]

Comments

[xxrancid-punkxx.livejournal.com]

Who cares about insurance. The federal part comes in when it comes to who has rights in terms of medical decisions. If your state doesn't allow civil unions or marriages, a person's life long partner can be viewed as a total stranger with no voice under the law.

We should not even be having this debate. Marriage rights are like civil rights, they should be understood and the law should be in favor of them.

[tori-dobbs.livejournal.com]

You can be a persons power of attorney and health care surrogate. Then you can make those decisions.

[homais.livejournal.com]

Actually, in practice that's a weaker right than you might think. It can be sometimes be hard to get (often legally ignorant, occasionally just hateful) medical staff to recognize that stuff - I've heard some truly jawdropping horror stories - which can be really bad if you're in one of those situations where minutes matter.

Worse, blood relatives can override that stuff pretty easily. You can write up all the documents you want, but legally, family still trumps you. Which, you know, causes problems if, say, your partner's family hates your guts because you're gay, and decide to take your partner and put him or her someplace where you have no access to them and no legal recourse. This does happen, and it's really, really horrible.

- source: my lawyer. I'm a homo, so at some point I actually investigated what some contracts do and don't buy you.

[cscottd.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, that doesn't always make as much of a difference as you might think.

Parents, siblings or children will often insist on making all of the decisions anyway, and they can usually get away with it, because in most states same-sex partners have no legal rights -- documents or no documents.