Certain NJ couples' period of ignoble separate/unequalness to be extended

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07/26/2010

by Jeremy Hooper

This from Steven Goldstein, Chair of Garden State Equality:

“Because of the legislature's inability to act and the Supreme Court's decision today, New Jersey continues in a caste system where an entire people are thrown aside into a profoundly inferior status, spit on, dumped on, utterly degraded, by hospitals and employers who mock the term "civil union." Children will continue to live with an imprimatur of inferiority, psychologically devastated because they can't marry or because their same-sex parents cannot marry. Same-sex couples will continue to be denied the consistent right to visit one another in the hospital, to make medical decisions for one another, and to receive equal health benefits from employers, all because of the deprivation of the equality and dignity that uniquely comes with the word ‘marriage.’

“We at Garden State Equality will never give up – not until our dying breath. Since our founding in 2004, New Jersey has enacted 211 laws at the state, county and local levels advancing the civil rights of LGBT community, a record matched in few other places in the world. It's because we and our allies, including so many predominantly straight organizations across New Jersey, never gave up and never gave in. And we never will give up or give in, so help us God.

“Cesar Chavez said it best. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the people who feel pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.

“We have seen the future, and the future is ours.”

So you might guess from a statement like the above that some sort of setback has happened. And unfortunately you'd be right: The New Jersey state Supreme Court, by a 3-3 vote (one seat is vacant), has denied the pro-equality side's motion to take the marriage equality case directly to the high court, instead ruling that the whole thing must go back to trial. Annoying.

**THE COURT's ORDER: