Pennsylvania hasn’t given its progressive citizens much to be proud of as of late.
Our legislature just passed a budget stripped of needed Medicaid expansions. Our schools are in desperate need of support and reform. Our state is becoming the holdout of the Northeast, as state after nearby state adopts marriage-equality laws. Our state has yet to even adopt basic LGBT nondiscrimination protections.
But this week, our own citizens gave us quite a bit to be proud of.
Twenty-three plaintiffs filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the state’s ban on same-sex marriage, the first suit of its kind to ever be filed in Pennsylvania. Winning marriage equality in Pennsylvania could be a complex web of litigation and legislation but, ultimately, it could be these 23 people who will make the best case for the freedom to marry in Pennsylvania.
Each of these individuals has a story to tell. They hail from all over the state and represent all sectors of the LGBT community — men, women, black, white, seniors, young people, parents, widows. They range from stay-at-home moms to small-business owners to retirees to executives to veterans. But, despite their differences, they all share one commonality: They have been detrimentally impacted by their inability to marry their loved one.
They have been denied health-insurance coverage, been made to pay inheritance taxes, been prevented from seeing their partners in the hospital, forced to carry powers-of-attorney with them at all times in case of an emergency — all because the state does not recognize their relationships, many of which they’ve been in for decades. Apart from the logistical and financial struggles, there is the emotional burden, as some couples have been forced to consider leaving their home state for better legal recognition, or to have to explain marriage inequality to their young children.
They stood on the steps of the Capital Rotunda in Harrisburg Tuesday morning and declared that they had had enough — enough discrimination, enough unfairness and enough denial of basic rights.
The fight for marriage equality in the Keystone State is sure to be a tough one; with a conservative legislature and governor and a sharp divergence of views throughout the state, few political pundits have put Pennsylvania on the list of the next states to sanction marriage equality.
But this case, however, may mark a new era in the marriage-equality movement in Pennsylvania; as opposed to LGBT-rights issues being considered abstract and unattainable, this suit puts a public face to this fight and a real fervor behind it. These 23 plaintiffs are everyday citizens, and their relatability could be integral in communicating to a vast body of stakeholders — the court, the legislature and, very importantly, the public — why they don’t deserve discrimination. While these 23 are ordinary Pennsylvanians, their contributions to our state’s LGBT-rights movement will be extraordinary.