In N.C., how do spouses of gay soldiers fit in? Legal brief presses the issue.

The friend-of-the-court brief, filed Friday, sets up a new battle space for gay rights activists in one of America’s most conservative, Christian corners.

|
Lynn Hey/News & Record/AP
Ellen 'Lennie' Gerber, left, smiles at Pearl Berlin, after speaking about the need to have their marriage recognized as the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina announces a lawsuit behalf of three married same-sex couples to order the State of North Carolina to recognize same-sex marriages Wednesday, in Greensboro.

North Carolina’s largest gay rights group on Friday asked a federal appeals court to consider: How can states justify barring benefits to same-sex military couples, including to widowed women who have lost wives in war?

A US Supreme Court ruling last June automatically conferred upon federal employees who are in legal same-sex marriages – including soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors – the same benefit rights as other married federal employees. But when couples live off-base, dispersion of some of those benefits goes only to beneficiaries defined under state law. In both North Carolina and Virginia – where the appeals court is located – marriage is reserved by law to unions between a man and a woman.

Because of that discrepancy, Tracy Johnson of Raeford, N.C., is not collecting $1,200-a-month survivor benefits after her wife, National Guard Staff Sgt. Donna Johnson, died in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan last year, according to a friend-of the-court brief filed Friday by the gay rights group Equality NC.

That brief, filed with the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., both raises the question about surviving spouses and discusses other issues faced by military families that are headed by same-sex couples.

Equality NC filed the brief for a case that the court will hear on May 13: Virginia’s appeal of a lower court ruling from earlier this year that struck down the state’s gay marriage ban. If the Fourth Circuit upholds the lower court, the ruling could have implications for other Southern states, including North Carolina.

The filing Friday has instantly set up a new battle space for gay rights activists in one of America’s most conservative, Christian corners. North Carolina, where the GOP holds the reins of power, contains scores of military installations, including Fort Bragg, Camp Lejeune, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, and Cherry Point, and the state has long been a prime retirement location for military veterans.

Against that backdrop, the friend-of-the-court brief was seen as a bold push to force North Carolinians to weigh two things that gay rights activists see as being at odds with each other: the state’s antipathy toward gay marriage – it became the last state to ban it with a constitutional amendment in 2012 – and its patriotic relationship with the US military.

“There’s of course a political bent to [the filing of the amicus brief], but what you want to do in politics is speak in a way that people will hear you,” says Jennifer Drobac, a law professor at Indiana University in Indianapolis. The North Carolina brief “opens the door for that message to get across – that [state laws are] disfavoring a population that has historically been favored in some of these more conservative states, like North Carolina.”

The filing is also playing on recent polling that suggests a lot of Southerners are making distinctions that allow them to set aside their moral objections to gay sex, while accepting the constitutional church-state separation – which bolsters the idea of state-sanctioned marriage being a civil, not religious, union.

According to a March poll by The Atlantic, 48 percent of Southerners now favor same-sex marriage, even as 37 percent at the same time state that homosexual sex is sinful.

Support for the gay marriage ban has decreased somewhat in North Carolina. Sixty-one percent of voters approved the constitutional ban two years ago, but now, 53 percent of residents support it, according to the Raleigh News & Observer.

So far, proponents of the gay marriage ban have struggled with how to respond to the filing. For one thing, it underscores that it’s possible for children of legally married same-sex couples to become “legal orphans” if one parent is killed while in the military, Professor Drobac says.

Supporters of traditional marriage in North Carolina have said that the Supreme Court, in its June ruling, meant for states to continue being able to define marriage.

So far, it’s unclear whether the appeal to help gay military families will move either the legal or cultural bar on gay marriage in the South.

“These are people who have served our country, sacrificed for our country when many of the rest of us do not do that. And the idea that the people who are out there fighting for freedom are then not given the freedom to marry and be seen as a married couple, that should be troubling for people who are concerned about justice,” says Brian Powell, a sociologist at Indiana University in Bloomington and author of the 2010 book “Counted Out,” which addresses same-sex couples and how American society defines family.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to In N.C., how do spouses of gay soldiers fit in? Legal brief presses the issue.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2014/0418/In-N.C.-how-do-spouses-of-gay-soldiers-fit-in-Legal-brief-presses-the-issue
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe