Mark Greene looks at Governor Walker of Wisconsin’s attempts last year to prevent gay couples from having hospital visitation rights.
Governor Walker of Wisconsin has a pattern of pandering to his base. In May of 2011, he decided he was going to try and block same sex couples visitation rights in hospitals. He and people like him can attempt this sort of thing because there is no federal law guaranteeing same sex marriage. And so, a complex and confusing hodgepodge of rules and regulations regarding hospital visitation rights for same sex couples is playing out in every state of the union.
So, I’d like to take a moment and talk about how an initiative like Governor Walker’s would have played out in the real world.
I have two good friends, Jim and TJ. They’re men. They’re married. I know them from my son’s elementary school. They have two great kids. We have pancakes at their house. We talk about how damn tired we are while our kids run circles around us. We laugh about all the stuff we didn’t expect when deciding to have kids. These guys get it. They get family.
Now, let’s take the Governor Walker’s effort last year as seen on OutsidetheBeltWay.com: ”Gov. Scott Walker believes a new law that gives gay couples hospital visitation rights violates the state constitution and has asked a judge to allow the state to stop defending it.”
To put it simply, he wanted to block hospital visitation rights for same-sex couples.
So now, I’m imagining a gay couple like Jim and TJ, who have done the hard work of parenting and caring for two children for six long wonderful years. A couple who has held it all together in the face of go go go days and sleepless nights, working to keep their family safe and happy.
Then, (god forbid) one of them gets hurt, say in a bad car crash in a state that doesn’t support same sex partner hospital visitation rights. (What the hell does that even mean? And why are we struggling to define this separate-but-equal bullshit?) Anyway, so one is in the hospital. What do you have then? You have their two children standing alone in the hospital room with their unconscious father, because their “other father” isn’t allowed to enter the room.
A federal law guaranteeing same sex marriage isn’t just about couples. Its about entire families.
Photo courtesy of Linda Cronin
About Mark Greene
Why is it that gay-rights activists act like there are no such things as powers-of-attorney and other estate planning devices? Do gay people have some kind of phobia about estate planning?
Healthcare powers-of-attorney are about the cheapest document your lawyer will ever draft for you.
So you’re one of those “the more pain in the ass bureaucratic paperwork the better” guys?
I know a cheaper document that is far more effacacious than a power-of-attorney that you don’t even need an attorney to draft for you.
It’s called a marriage license.
“Why is it that gay-rights activists act like there are no such things as powers-of-attorney and other estate planning devices? Do gay people have some kind of phobia about estate planning?’
On the off chance this is an honest question, I’ll answer it. Hospitals ignore POAs whenever they feel like it, and by the time the aprtner or spouse fights his way in it may be too late. It happens all the time. They have ignored them in the past, they have allowed families to contradict them, and they will continue to do so in the future.
You know, you could have asked some “gay-rights activists” yourself and come here already knowing the answer.
Why SHOULD LGBT couples pay an attorney for rights that opposite sex couples have automatically? And, for your information, even when they DO have health care directives, homophobic medical staff will ignore those directives, sometimes letting a partner die alone while his or her frantic partner sits helplessly in a waiting room.
If any LGBT person wants free advance directives with hospital visitation rights, they are available at http://www.rainbowlaw.com/free-documents
In the famous case in Florida where a partner was denied visitation by the hospital, she produced a durable power of attorney form which was ignored.
I don’t know how cheap it was but it was sure worthless against homophobes like you.
Blocking visitation doesn’t make any sense. In many cases, you don’t have to be a blood relative of the patient or be married to the patient to be considered “family of the patient.” So, why can a hospital block someone of the same sex because he/she is not technically family? It makes no sense.
This would also limit access to long-term opposite sex partners. No “boyfriends” allowed whether the patient is male or female. Any time gay rights are limited, straight rights are limited as well.
I’m not familiar with the Wisconsin constitution, but I’m really curious to hear how making an open visitation policy is contrary to the state constitution. Is it discrimination against homophobes?
Not only power-of-attorney documents useful, but also “advance directives” and living wills. It’s a good idea to have these even if you are married to the patient.
So I am really not in a happy mood at the moment…so just keep that in mind. I’m being a bit…nitpicky with this…but I think it’s sort of worth saying. I’m totally agreeing with all that you’re saying, firstly. But this bit right here bugged me:
“Any time gay rights are limited, straight rights are limited as well.”
I’m going to try to explain why…so to start with, Walker’s objection is directed at gay people. All of these limiting policies are directed at gay people…the fact that it may limit straight rights is unintentional and a side issue. The intent is to make gay people (and gay couples more specifically) second-class citizens, without access to the same rights and societal benefits that straight people have. That’s the intent…and shouldn’t that be reason enough to oppose it?
And to say that it’ll affect straight people in the same way as gay people isn’t true. It won’t. It could limit the rights of some straight people who happen to fall into certain social categories….but it will limit the rights of all gay people in Wisconsin. It is systematic discrimination against a group of people, and for me, bringing up how straight people might be hurt by this sort of thing pulls attention away from how discriminatory it is.
I hope you get what I’m saying, and realize I’m not really directing this comment at you, Wellokaythen.
Oh dear. I think we agree more than you think we do. I think I see where you’re coming from, and I can understand how my message gave the wrong impression, so let me clarify.
I was not intending to say that such policies would affect gay and straight people *equally*. I was not trying to imply that the effects on straight people are the main issue. My point was that straight people would be foolish to look at this as something that “only affects gay people.”
There are somewhat sympathetic heteros out there who may not be very much interested in same-sex marriage rights because they think that it’s just about a tiny minority of the population and has nothing to do with them. My point is that denying basic rights to gay people tends to have direct or indirect effects on the rights of the larger majority as well.
It’s a clumsy way of saying the aphorism “gay rights are human rights.” Or “divided we fall.”
Yeah, and I know that’s probably what you meant. I was in a bad mood yesterday and everything was sort of getting under my skin. I was having a reaction similar to what Danny mentioned here.
Still friends?
I don’t think people that are working to deny gay people rights care much for long-term heterosexual relationships that are not based in marriage either.
But, as I’m sure you realize, the difference is that the straight people can at any time choose to get married. In fact, I believe that in many places, if they aren’t actively trying to make sure it doesn’t happen, the government could go ahead and declare them legally married. [Being fair, that may just be one of those things that everybody says but is actually apocryphal.]
I guess Governor Walker was worried that the effort to recall him from office was losing steam, so he wanted to provide added incentive to the residents of Wisconsin to get rid of him.
Heckuva job, Scottie!
Clutching at straws. I hope this one snaps and he drops like a rock.
What’s really sad is that a law was needed to give gay couples hospital rights in the first place. What sort of society really has hospital staff that’ll tell a life-long partner they can’t be with their partner in a time of crisis all because they aren’t married, which, by the way, they can’t do legally anyway. — Sorry, I know you’ve been a couple for the past decade, but you’re not married so you can’t be at your partner’s bedside while he recovers from a car crash/cancer/whatever. — Yeah…we’re a bastion of equality alright.
Personally, I’m tired of all the little bits here and there that individual states are granting to same-sex couples, then taking away, then granting again, etc. Let’s repeal DOMA, provide a federal anti-discrimination law…and let me go about living my life without checking the news every day to see whether I’m more or less equal to straight people than I was yesterday. Oh yeah, I’d really like it if I no longer needed to politicize my sexual orientation. And you know what…if I were equal, I wouldn’t flipping have to.
Right well, turns out this story is almost a year old, and his attempts were shut down:
http://thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2-governor-scott-walker-kills-same-sex-couples-hospital-visitation-rights/politics/2012/04/09/37781
So at least there’s that.
Thanks for the heads up, Heather.