Why Philly needs gay marriage

I’ve been surprised, since moving to Philly, that a lot of the pro-gay-marriage activism in this city has been focused almost entirely on California and Proposition 8. Maybe I’m missing stuff – I don’t hob-nob with Philly’s gay activists – but that’s kind of weird to me. Philly’s relatively gay-friendly, from what I can tell, but there aren’t marriage rights here. So why no fuss?

I thought about this again last night, reading a piece in National Journal about a gay couple from Ohio. One of the partners got sick while on a trip to Philly, and it got complicated.

Having just been told, at 3 a.m., that his partner of three decades might die within hours, Mike Brittenback was told something else: Before rushing to Bill’s side, he needed to collect and bring with him documents proving his medical power of attorney. This indignity, unheard-of in the world of heterosexual marriage, is a commonplace of American gay life.

Frantic, Mike tore through the house but could not find the papers. He would need to retrieve them from a safe-deposit box. Which was at a bank. Which did not open until 9 a.m.

Somehow Mike made it through the next six hours, “crying and frantic and all kinds of awful things running through my mind,” fetched the documents, and got on the road. By some higher mercy, those lost hours did not cost Bill his life. When Mike arrived in Philadelphia on Saturday afternoon, Bill was still alive, though in grave danger.

Mike had packed clothes for a week.

And that’s what the fight for marriage is about: Not simply the right to love each other — no law can force or prohibit that — but the right to care for each other.

My relatively open-minded conservative friends say they don’t have a problem with gay couples loving and caring for each other. They just don’t want to give up “marriage” as being exclusively a straight institution. But that’s a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too conflict I can’t reconcile. Sure, some states allow gay couples the legal right to care for each other through civil unions. But a lot of states don’t go that far. And so gay couples are forced to deal with indignities and obstacles that heterosexual couples don’t experience — and would never stand for, frankly.

So Philly needs gay marriage. Pennsylvania needs gay marriage. Loving, committed couples need the right to care for each other. It’s that simple.