Connecticut Rings In

Now that the Constitution State has become the third in the nation to extend marriage equality, what’s next?

By Julie Weisberg

From The Advocate November 8, 2008

After several years of legal wrangling and uncertainty, Barbara Levine-Ritterman of New Haven, Conn., was overjoyed at the news that she would soon be able to legally marry her longtime partner, Robin. “It was glorious,” says Barbara, who works as a computer consultant. “We’ve waited a long time for this.”

The two women were one of eight couples who sued the state of Connecticut in 2004 after they were refused marriage licenses. And on October 10, Connecticut became the third state in the nation to legalize marriage equality -- joining California and Massachusetts -- after its supreme court ruled that denying gay couples the right to marry violated the state’s constitution. Currently, Connecticut affords same-sex couples only the recognition of civil unions, but sometime shortly after October 28, when the ruling takes effect, they’ll be able to marry.

“It’s been an eight-year campaign, and it felt really good to get where we got,” says Anne Stanback, executive director of the Hartford-based Love Makes a Family. Her group led the grass-roots lobbying effort for equal marriage rights in Connecticut, working closely with attorneys from Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, who represented the plaintiffs.

In a decision hailed as precedent-cementing by many observers, Justice Richard Palmer wrote for the majority that “gay persons are entitled to marry the otherwise qualified same-sex partner of their choice. To decide otherwise would require us to apply one set of constitutional principles to gay persons and another to all others. The guarantee of equal protection under the law, and our obligation to uphold that command, forbids us from doing so.”

They were just the kind of words that plaintiffs like Garrett Stack, a retired school administrator from Woodbridge, Conn., had hoped to hear. “ ‘Separate but equal’ has been rejected by the court. It gives you faith in our judicial system,” says Stack, who has been with his partner, John Anderson, for 27 years. “It’s what people do when they’re in love -- they get married -- and we’re as good and valuable as other people.”

GLAD, in conjunction with a team of Connecticut-based attorneys, filed the case on behalf of eight same-sex couples who were denied marriage licenses in the town of Madison in 2004. In Kerrigan and Mock et al. v. Connecticut Dept. of Public Health (the department that supervises marriage licensing in Connecticut), plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that the state’s 2005 civil union law failed to provide same-sex couples with the equal protection guaranteed under Connecticut’s constitution.

Although the state superior court ruled in June 2006 that civil unions did provide same-sex couples with equal protections, the couples appealed, and the supreme court began hearing arguments in May 2007.

In the majority supreme court opinion, Justice Palmer also discussed the positive impact marriage has on families, in particular when it comes to legally protecting children and providing them a sense of stability and security in the home.

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