New York Gay Couples Head to Massachusetts With Marriage in Mind
New York Times
By Tina Kelley
August 2, 2008


Gabriel Blau and Dylan Stein will be heading to Amherst, Mass., in a matter of weeks to complete a marriage ceremony they started two years ago.

At the couple’s Jewish wedding in a Hell’s Kitchen loft in 2006, they had a floral-embroidered chuppah, stomped on a glass in front of 175 friends and relatives, and were hoisted on chairs amid a hora-dancing throng. But one thing was missing: a marriage certificate.

This week, they called their rabbi to arrange another service, this one in Massachusetts, which on Thursday repealed a century-old law preventing out-of-state residents from marrying there if their home states would not recognize the union.

Because Gov. David A. Paterson directed New York State agencies in May to recognize gay marriages performed in other jurisdictions, Mr. Blau and Mr. Stein are among scores of couples expected to tie — or retie — the knot in coming months.

While some New Yorkers have flown across the country to marry in California since May, when that state became the nation’s second to approve same-sex marriage, gay-rights advocates expect many more to do the same in Massachusetts, since it is so much closer.

“We call it the Amtrak option, as opposed to the Jet Blue option,” said Cathy Renna, a communications consultant to gay and lesbian organizations.

Alan Van Capelle, executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, a leading gay-rights group, said, “I think this is an incredible opportunity for same-sex New York couples who are hungry for some of the 1,324 rights and responsibilities married couples receive to obtain them.”

Governor Paterson’s decision placed New York alongside Rhode Island and New Mexico in recognizing same-sex marriages performed in Massachusetts, according to a Boston-based advocacy group, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders.

A June memo from the Massachusetts Office of Housing and Economic Development estimated that 21,000 gay couples from New York might go there to marry if the state allowed. That is about 43 percent of the estimated 49,000 same-sex couples in New York. About 9,600 same-sex couples from Massachusetts married in the first three years after the state legalized such unions in 2004.

With Governor Paterson’s blessing, New Yorkers who get married in Massachusetts — or Canada or California — will be eligible for a host of benefits that they cannot receive now, according to Mr. Van Capelle of the Pride Agenda. Firefighters and police officers in particular have a lot to gain, because the state gives significant benefits to the spouses of emergency workers killed in the line of duty.

For Darcy Rickard, 39, of Albany, one of the main benefits of a marriage certificate will be a tax break. After her Massachusetts wedding, planned for October in Provincetown, her partner, Debbie Rodrigues, 44, will be eligible for coverage under Ms. Rickard’s health insurance, without having to pay state tax on the value of those benefits.

(Federal tax will have to be paid, since the federal government does not recognize gay marriages at all.)

And when they travel with Ms. Rickard’s 13-year-old daughter, they will no longer need to carry a ream of legal papers to prove their relationship at hospitals if one of them becomes ill or is injured in an accident. In addition, Ms. Rickard said, legally married partners have more rights in the case of a breakup.

“But really, the driving reason to get married is because we love each other,” she said. “When you’re committed, you want to show it.”

Ms. Rickard fretted that by not yet allowing same-sex marriages, New York is missing out.

“It’s money we’re going to spend in Massachusetts, not in New York,” she said of the wedding they are planning.

The New York City comptroller’s office estimated in a June 2007 report that allowing gay marriage could bring $142 million to the local economy in the first three years. The state would collect an additional $8 million in taxes and the city would collect an additional $7 million, and companies in New York would benefit from a wider pool of possible employees attracted by the change in marriage laws, the report projected.

A June analysis by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, on the other hand, estimated that Massachusetts could add $111 million to the economy over three years by taking the step it did this week to allow out-of-state couples to marry there. The report also suggested that the move could result in 330 new jobs and increase state and local revenues by $5.1 million.

Figures about how many New York couples have traveled out of state to get married or enter into civil unions are nearly impossible to come by, advocates said.

Assemblyman Daniel J. O’Donnell, a Democrat who represents the Upper West Side, expressed concern that New York might now have a caste system, with gay couples who can afford to go to Massachusetts or California enjoying more rights than those who cannot do so. But he also said that more married gay couples living in the state could help his efforts to pass a gay marriage law.

“Local officials will see that no harm comes to anyone for their constituents’ having access to a marriage license,” he said.

But a Christian group that sued Governor Paterson over his gay-marriage directive questioned whether the Massachusetts marriages would be valid in New York before resolution of the lawsuit, which is scheduled for a court hearing on Thursday.

“The people have not had a voice in this, either in Massachusetts or New York,” said Glen Lavy, senior counsel with the group, the Alliance Defense Fund, based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “So this is simply short-circuiting the democratic process.”

Assemblyman O’Donnell is one of many gay-marriage advocates waiting to be able to marry in their own states.

Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a national advocacy group based in New York, said that many people he talked to wanted to be able to marry at home, “and I count myself among them.”

“I don’t think New Yorkers should have to go to Niagara Falls, Canada, to have what we should have in Niagara Falls, New York,” he said.

But Deborah and Mia Jacoby-Twigg of Highland Mills, N.Y., were tired of waiting. At 1:15 p.m. on Friday, they became the first out-of-state gay couple to marry in Provincetown, Mass., the clerk in charge told them.

Already on vacation on Cape Cod, they drove to the town of Orleans, a half-hour away, to get a waiver of the standard three-day waiting period for a marriage license and find a solemnizer, who conducted the service as their 3-year-old sons, Noah and Nate, ran around in the municipal auditorium.

“The solemnizer asked if we had rings, and I said I’d been wearing mine for 10 years and don’t think I can get it off,” said Deborah Jacoby-Twigg, 51.

For her, the marriage means the end of the perpetual confusion she faced when filling out official forms.

“I can check ‘married’ in New York, and that means a lot,” she said. “Our boys have two legally married moms, and that’s a beautiful thing.”