Edel Quinones lived in Virginia for 10 years, but early this year, he sold his Arlington townhouse to move to the District.Why indeed.
"It felt like I wasn't welcome anymore," he said.
Quinones and his partner of three years are joining a migration of gay people out of Virginia in the face of recent legislative action they perceive as hostile.
Twenty states have amended their constitution to ban same-sex marriage since 2004. Virginia state legislators passed a law two years ago that prohibits "civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage." A proposed constitutional amendment, which will go to voters in November, excludes any "unmarried individuals" from "union, partnership or other legal status similar to marriage."
Many gay people in Virginia and some family-law attorneys say they worry that the state law and proposed amendment are more far-reaching than simple bans on gay marriage -- that the measures could threaten the legal viability of the contracts used by gay couples to share ownership of property and businesses.
The exact effects are unclear, and the 2004 law remains untested, but some gays say they fear the laws could affect their ability to own homes together; to draft powers of attorney, adoption papers or wills; or to arrange for hospital visitation or health surrogacy.
Married people get these rights automatically through long-established common law; gay people use legal documents to ensure they can leave their property at death to their partner or allow their partner, rather than the patient's birth family, to make end-of-life decisions for them. Some gay people worry that hostile family members could use the language in the laws to seize their possessions or take custody of their children if they could prove the couple had a relationship that illegally approximated a marriage.
[...]
Emmanuel Vaughan, who writes customer-service training scripts, is another transplant. He moved to a place in the District in October, putting his Arlington house up for sale. He said he moved because he became angry over what the state legislature was doing, and he worried that he and his partner, Drew Lent, an international trainer, could be in legal jeopardy.
"As an African-American, having grown up during the Civil Rights movement in Birmingham, Ala., I am not willing to have my rights taken away from me by ignorant, religious zealots who don't respect the constitutional understanding of separation of Church and State when scripting laws," he wrote in an e-mail. "It was apparent to me that things weren't getting any better, but worse. Why should I continue to pay taxes to support such a hateful government?"
What these ignorant, religious zealots forget is that gay people who work and own homes and go shopping and register cars and so forth also pay taxes, and they usually do it at a higher rate since they're not allowed to take the marriage deduction. They also contribute to the community in the same way anybody else would; volunteering for civic duties, contributing to their church or place of worship, and in all the other mundane ways that people who live in a community and care for it do.
It may be all well and good for the Religious Reich to have some smug sense of self-satisfaction that they've gotten rid of all the icky queers, but let's see what happens the next time they want to get their hair done or put on a musical...
