Welcome to one of the most historic weeks for LGBT people in the history of our nation.  Same-sex couples are now marrying in California!  Let's make New Jersey next.  We cannot settle for anything less:  Our civil union law is the biggest civil rights failure of our time.  Please take the next 15 seconds to email your legislators with this pre-written letter.  You're asking them to sponsor the marriage equality bill now before the state legislature.

Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,

I ask you to add your name as a sponsor of S1967 / A2978, The Freedom of Religion and Equality in Civil Marriage Act, whose primary sponsors are Senators Loretta Weinberg and Ray Lesniak, and Assembly members Reed Gusciora, Valerie Vainieri Huttle, John McKeon and Mila Jasey.

The bill would allow same-sex couples to marry while reinforcing the constitutional right of religions and their clergy members to refrain from performing marriages they don't wish to perform.

Given the massive news coverage, you are no doubt familiar with the failure of the civil union law to provide the equality to same-sex couples that the New Jersey Supreme Court mandated.

A report of the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission earlier this year called the New Jersey civil union law "a failed experiment." In fact, an astonishing 1 in every 3 civil union couples across New Jersey reports that their employers refuse to recognize civil unions as the equivalent of marriage precisely because they're not called marriage.

The result shocks the conscience: Without equal benefits from employers, many same-sex families are living check to check, struggling to cover their basic health care needs.

But the struggle for marriage equality is more than about civil rights. It's also about family dignity.

Children of civil union couples in New Jersey are coming home in tears because their families have inferior labels, because classmates are asking them why that's the case.

How could New Jersey inflict such horrible psychological harm on anyone's children?

There is much evidence that marriage equality will fix the problems with our civil union law.

Since marriage equality became the law in Massachusetts in 2004, Massachusetts has seen virtually no complaints of same-sex families being discriminated against and denied benefits - the opposite of what's happened in New Jersey.

In Massachusetts, even with the federal ERISA loophole that allows employers not to recognize same-sex relationships, the word "marriage" has had tremendous persuasive weight to get employers to do the right thing.

So New Jersey can indeed to something right now, without waiting for the federal government to act, to fix the disaster that is our civil union law. Time and education will absolutely not fix the problem.

Vermont, which enacted civil unions in the year 2000, just issued a government report saying that its own civil union law is failing to work like marriage even eight years later.

Again, I ask you to sponsor S1967 / A2978, the Freedom of Religion and Equality in Civil Marriage Act. As California and Massachusetts understand, same-sex couples deserve equality, and only marriage is equality.

Sincerely,

Campaign Launched:
June 16, 2008