g********d
发帖数: 4174 | 1 Posted on Advocate.com February 08, 2012 02:30:00 PM ET
Marriage Equality Bill Introduced in Illinois
By Trudy Ring
KELLY CASSIDY GREG HARRIS DEB MELL X390 (FAIR) | ADVOCATE.COM
Cassidy, Harris, Mell
On the heels of Tuesday’s federal appeals court ruling for marriage
equality in California, Illinois legislators have filed a bill to bring
equality to that state.
Illinois’s three openly gay state representatives — Kelly Cassidy, Greg
Harris, and Deborah Mell — today introduced the Religious Freedom and
Marriage Fairness Act, which would grant same-sex couples the same marriage
rights as opposite-sex ones.
The state began offering civil unions to gay couples last year, but while “
an important intermediate step,” those have turned out to be insufficient,
said Bernard Cherkasov, CEO of LGBT rights group Equality Illinois.
“In following experiences of thousands of couples in civil unions over the
past year, we confirmed what we always suspected to be true: that creating a
separate institution to provide substantially the same rights did not add
up to full equality under the law,” Cherkasov said in a press release. “A
pharmacist who denied prescription pickup to the patient’s civil union
partner didn’t think it’s the same thing as marriage. A coroner who
refused to issue a death certificate to civil union partner survivor did not
think that civil unions are the same as marriage.”
Anthony Martinez, executive director of the Civil Rights Agenda, another
Illinois LGBT organization, voiced similar sentiments. The group supported
the civil union bill “as an initial step to providing rights and benefits
to same-sex couples, but separate is never equal,” he said in a news
release. “Marriage has always been one of the principal goals for our
organization, and we are pleased to finally be able to move forward towards
achieving that goal.” | g********d
发帖数: 4174 | | m******1
发帖数: 19713 | | X*******H
发帖数: 720 | | r******8
发帖数: 1486 | |
|
