A Fiancee Left in Limbo

Back in 2006 when The Family Foundation (James Dobson's Virginia affiliate) vigorously pushed for passage of the so-called Marshall-Newman Amendment to "ban same sex marriage" in Virginia, one important aspect of the discrimination being written into Virginia's Constitution was deliberately down played: the amendment would not only strip same sex couples of all marital like rights, but it would do the same for non-legally married heterosexual couples.

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Today many straight couples who have co-habitated in some instances for many, many years still do not realize that should either one of them die, thanks to the Christianists, they will have ABSOLUTELY ZERO rights to their partners assets, retirement, etc., unless they have proper wills in place and held title to assets as joint tenants with right of survivorship. This result is part of the larger Christianist goal to legally punish all those who do not marry or otherwise live their lives according to Christianist religious beliefs. A story from the Washington Post about the fiancee of a member of the U.S. military hopefully will wake some people up to this reality:

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So much now depends on the ring. For Kyle Harper, there are few other signs remaining of the life she should have had with her fiance. For the longest time, she kept the diamond engagement ring on her finger. It proved what the world at times refused to acknowledge: that she had mattered to Sgt. Michael Hullender.

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When Michael was killed on a dusty road in Iraq, Kyle, now 27, got her first inkling from a roommate who told her Michael's parents had called. There was no knock on the door, no official phone call or notification. Later, when she tried to obtain the things he left behind -- an old T-shirt, his dog tags, little mementos from his quarters -- she found herself floating in legal limbo, with no rights to his effects or his name.

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[O]nly the marriage certificate counts. As a result, the military had to treat Kyle the way it does all fiancees -- as though she had no relationship with Michael. All the Army could offer were condolences. There would be no grief counseling, no casualty pay, no say in his burial. Those rights fell to his next of kin. And even there, after his death, a few in his family sided with the military. After all, they pointed out, they had known Michael his whole life. She had met him only in his last years. Rifts formed. Words were exchanged.

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[A]n obscure 2004 survey by a West Point researcher estimating that 25 percent of soldiers in Iraq have "significant others" who are not spouses. The stories behind those numbers vary along with each couple's reasons for not tying the knot. Some simply aren't ready; others don't believe in the institution.

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When someone is killed like that, she said, a strange impulse creeps up among the survivors to rank their pain against one another's: father, best friend, sister, fiancee. It's a pointless exercise, though. In the end, everyone loses.

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It is a sad story made even sadder by the fact that proper legal documentation could have insured that Kyle would not have treated as a total legal stranger to Michael.