How gay married couples get shortchanged
June 9, 2013 at 10:32 AM ET
Jason DeCrow / AP
Patrick Plain, left, and Seong Man Hong, both of New York, celebrate
after getting married at the City Clerk's office in New York Sunday,
July 24, 2011.
More than 1,000 federal rights and
securities are denied to couples in same-sex marriages not legally
recognized by Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, says
Vickie Henry, senior staff attorney at Boston-based Gay & Lesbian
Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD. GLAD is a leading advocacy group in
the campaign to strike down DOMA.
"Few of those benefits are more
important than Social Security," says Crosby Burns, policy analyst of
the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American
Progress, an independent, nonpartisan educational institute based in
Washington, D.C.
"This program forms part of the bedrock of our
nation's safety net," Burns says. "With full and equal access to this
social insurance program, families headed by same-sex couples would
finally have access to the economic safeguards they need, intended to
keep them out of poverty and afloat during hard times."
Chief
among them, Henry says, are the spousal benefit, the spousal disability
benefit, the lump-sum benefit and the survivors benefit. The children of
same-sex parents would also be affected.
Read on to see how the
Social Security system works in favor of heterosexual married couples
and against same-sex married couples. If DOMA is struck down, gay
couples stand to gain more Social Security benefits.
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