For years Knight attempted to enact a gay-marriage ban in California. After several failed attempts in the Assembly, he finally succeeded by spear-heading a ballot referendum, Proposition 22, in 2000.       

But Knight wants to make sure gay families have no legal protection.

Earlier this month, he and Assemblyman Ray Haynes, R-Murietta, cleared for petition circulation a ballot measure to overturn AB205, California's new comprehensive domestic partnership legislation.

AB205 provides registered domestic partners in California with almost all of the rights and responsibilities of married couples.        

Knight's on the warpath against AB205 even though more than 70 percent of California voters support legal rights for domestic partners. Moreover, his crusade apparently outweighs his party's, and many voters', concerns about California's budget crisis.        

The study we co-wrote this past summer, "Equal Rights, Fiscal Responsibility," published by UCLA School of Law's Williams Project, shows that gay and lesbian equality is the financially responsible path for the state to take. AB205 will save the California budget millions of dollars each year.        

The rights granted by AB205 are cheap from the state's perspective. Because before AB205 state employees already could cover their domestic partners for most employment benefits, the state will experience an imperceptible increase in spending on retirement benefits.        

The responsibility side of marriage will have a positive impact on the state budget. Under the new law, domestic partners will shoulder a new obligation to financially support one another.  

The state benefits from the new financial accountability because some people currently receiving public assistance will no longer need it and will no longer qualify for state assistance.

Even if only a small number of people leave public benefit programs when becoming domestic partners under AB205, the state will save more than $11 million each year.

Businesses will gain, too, because they will have greater security for $13 million to $78 million in unpaid debts gained from the new domestic partners' assets.

AB205 will make registered same-sex partners financially accountable for each other's debts, just as spouses are currently in a civil marriage.

Equality buys the state budget and California businesses other benefits as well. For example, same-sex couples from across the country will travel to California to register, thereby boosting the state's business climate by at least $9 million to $40 million and adding to state tax coffers.

Furthermore, the state court system will be able to move conflicts over the dissolution of same-sex relationships into the place best-suited and cheapest to handle them: family court.

All of these benefits are more than enough to offset the minimal administrative costs of changing some state forms to accommodate the status of the newly partnered.

Why will same-sex couples want to become domestic partners given some of the apparent disadvantages? Probably for the same reasons that so many same-sex couples are headed for Canada and that millions of heterosexual couples marry despite having to pay the federal "marriage penalty" in income taxes.

People enter a legal and ethical commitment like marriage or domestic partnership for many reasons apart from economic considerations. Caterers, reception halls and fancy clothes all bear an obvious price tag. But the value of the cultural, social and legal recognition of one's commitment to another person is priceless.

Knight's new initiative shows the increasing hypocrisy of the far right. They say they support "family values" but seek to overturn a law protecting tens of thousands of California families.

They say they believe in fiscal responsibility but will enforce their prejudice even if it costs the state tens of millions of dollars each year.

Equal treatment of same-sex couples is not only the right thing to do - it is good for the state's budget and California businesses.

This time, we must say no to Knight.

M. V. Lee Badgett is research director of the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies and teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
R. Bradley Sears is director of the Williams Project for Sexual Orientation and the Law at UCLA.