N.J. couples' lawsuit urges gay marriage

TRENTON - Seven gay couples and many of their children filed a lawsuit Wednesday to demand that New Jersey recognize same-sex marriage, calling it the only way to solve inequities created by the state's four-year-old civil-union law.

State lawmakers created that law to try to fulfill a 2006 state Supreme Court order that gay couples be given the same legal protections and benefits as married couples. The couples say the civil union doesn't cut it in places such as insurance offices and hospital emergency rooms, where marriage rights come into play.

The suit offers several examples, including lesbians who had to pay thousands of dollars for the non-birth mother to adopt the couple's child and couples who have found they have to carry binders of legal documents to prove their relationships in case of emergency. Not being married, they say, makes their children wonder why society doesn't value their families as much as others'.

One plaintiff, Louise Walpin of Monmouth Junction, said she'd had to explain to a judge - and everyone in the courtroom - when called for jury duty that she was in a civil union, not married.

"I had to out myself in front of strangers," Walpin said at the Trenton news conference where the suit was announced. She said she wondered whether she had been left off the jury or been denied jobs because she's a lesbian.

And there was the story of John Grant, who was struck by a car in New York City. The Asbury Park man's civil-union partner, Danny Weiss, said he had been told that he wasn't entitled to make urgent medical decisions for Grant. Instead, Grant's sister was summoned to the hospital in the middle of the night.

New York lawmakers voted Friday to recognize gay marriage. Before that, the state recognized unions from other states.

"Nobody should have to endure the indignity that we did," Weiss said Wednesday.

The lawsuit, filed in state court by the national gay-rights law firm Lambda Legal and the New Jersey gay-rights group Garden State Equality, comes less than a week after Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the New York law. The lawsuit is the latest step in a nine-year legal battle in New Jersey.

States afford gay couples a hodgepodge of rights. New Jersey is one of seven states that offer the same legal protections of marriage but call them civil unions or domestic partnerships. Once New York's law takes effect next month, six states and Washington, D.C., will make full marriage available to gays.