Banishing gay partners to the waiting room

[kweerwolf]

TWO YEARS AGO, my then-domestic partner of seven years had a life-threatening stroke. Rick was only 39. I walked through the door of our home and found him stumbling, drooling, arms slowly flailing about, trying but unable to speak, banging against the walls. It is still a vivid, painful memory.

<snip>

I was one of two people, other than Rick, who remembered that he had suffered something akin to a mild stroke 10 years earlier. With this information the doctors were able to speed up their diagnosis and treatment. These are the histories loved ones memorize as they build their lives together. How dangerously cruel that because we are gay, some people want you to believe our responsibility for each other, our lives and our histories, shouldn't count.

I thank God that Rick has had a near complete recovery. This is why it is infuriating — and medieval — that signature-gatherers are outside stores and restaurants, asking people to sign petitions to place an initiative on the June 2006 ballot that would take away the right of all gays and lesbians to make medical decisions for our domestic partners. The initiative would also invalidate domestic partnership rights for same-sex couples. All of them. The initiative would even ban hospital visitation rights for domestic partners, though its proponents deny it.

THE SPONSORS call it the "Voters Right to Protect Marriage Initiative." But the state attorney general's office has correctly renamed it "Marriage. Elimination of Domestic Partnership Rights" because that's what it would do. What would these people have had me do on that Father's Day weekend two years ago? When literally every minute counted, they would have had me try to track down Rick's mother in Cincinnati on that holiday so that she could make medical decisions from afar, over the phone.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bennett14aug14,0,5313330.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

[Branjor]

1. Well...

that might have been one way to kill Rick off. Maybe that's the whole idea of it.

It is awful that there are people who actually work to take away the rights of others - sort of an anti-civil rights movement, and they name their movement as the opposite of what it really is.

[Occulus]

3. It's because of their (incorrect) interpretation of the Bible.

They fixate upon one single phrase and use take it to mean homosexuality must be wiped out, and if a few homosexuals die, well, they were unclean abominations that couldn't be 'saved' anyway.

Anyone presenting me with such a petition will wish they had never done so. At the very least, I'll be taking that set of signatures with me- so I can burn it.

[arwalden]

2. These People Are Twisted, Evil, And Must Be Stopped.

Have you ever HATED someone so much you could taste it?

[Obamarama]

4. 8 years ago my partner was in a terrible accident....

Most of the damage was confined to one of his lower limbs and there was a possibility he was going to lose his foot (he didn't and eventually made a full recovery).

When I was back in the ER with him waiting for them to take him away to surgery, a nurse came back and asked me who I was. I told her I was his partner and she said "We'll you'll need to wait in the surgical lounge. Only family is allowed to be back here."

Luckily, we had drawn up patient advocate forms and durable medical power of attorney forms for one another which would give either of us the legal right to vist and/or make medical decisions for one another.

I told the nurse, in a tone which left no mistake that I was highly displeased, that if needed I would drive home and get those documents, but that if she thought I was pissed now, it would be nothing compared to when I returned. I won, but NOBODY should have to worry about going through something like that during a time like that.

Moral of the story: If you are in a permanent gay/lesbian relationship and you do NOT have these documents to protect yourselves in the event of an emergency, please get them ASAP. Don't put it off.

[kbm8795]

5. Well, these people are neither christian nor compassionate.

But they do traffic in hate and fear. As a group who has spent decades as one of their primary targets, it is increasingly important that we not only face them head-on, but not be afraid to question their own claim to be morally superior on every level.

In my opinion, there is nothing wrong in suggesting that these people change their religious beliefs or go to church. That is sure a helluva lot more easily done than demanding that we either change our sexual orientation or become celibate creatures who sacrifice a fulfilling life in order to support their insane insecurities.