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Straight in Seattle: Lawsuit Mocks Progress for Washington’s Gay and Lesbian Couples

Washington State’s new domestic partnership law took affect yesterday, and already a heterosexual woman has filed suit because her live-in boyfriend was denied healthcare benefits by Honeywell, The Seattle Times reported. Sandi Scott-Moore’s lawsuit is one of the first of several filed because of the new law.  According to the newspaper, Washington has more than 600 employers offering some kind of domestic-partner benefit. Many prominent Washington companies offer benefit packages to married heterosexual couples as well as gay and lesbian couples, including Honeywell.  Few go the step further to define unmarried heterosexuals as domestic partners.

Citing census numbers, The Seattle Times estimated that nearly 36,000 heterosexual Washington couples live together outside of marriage, compared to an estimated 17,000 gay and lesbian couples. The state of Washington’s new law provides rights and responsibilities to registered domestic partners, which is defined as same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples with one partner age 62 or older. The specific reference to older opposite-sex couples was designed to include those who would lose pensions or similar benefits should they remarry.

Effective as of July 22, 2007, the Washington law establishes a statewide domestic partner registry and granted some specific rights, including hospital visitation, the right to make medical decisions when one partner is not competent, the right to inherit when a partner dies without a will, the right to be appointed administrator of a partner’s estate, the right to make funeral arrangements, and the right to bring a wrongful death lawsuit with regard to a deceased partner. (See the Human Rights Campaign’s Website for more specifics on marriage rights in Washington.)

There is an obvious lack of logic and fairness, though, in Sandi Scott-Moore’s lawsuit. How can a now former employee of Honeywell’s Redmond, Washington office sue because her relationship is not recognized? All she has to do is get married– a privilege that has always been available to her but is still denied to the state’s gay and lesbian couples.  A quick trip to the courthouse, and Scott-Moore instantly enjoy much more than the limited benefits of her state’s first attempt to treat LGBT persons as equals.  She could benefit from federal defense of her marriage nationwide.

Perhaps Scott-Moore is just a disgruntled former employee out to embarrass and harass a company that is considered one of the better guys in extending benefits and protections to its queer employees.  Or perhaps her case is a case-in-point that LGBT couples and the few freedom-minded legislators who seek to protect them face more and more barriers to basic government recognition of their relationships.