An Early Christmas Gift: Wisconsin Court Upholds Domestic Partner Registry

So, up there in Wisconsin, LGBT rights advocates scored an early Christmas victory when an appeals court ruled that state’s domestic partnership registry was constitutional. But the bad news is that, as sometimes happens at Christmas, the gift might be returned.

Conservatives vow to take the case all the way the Wisconsin’s GOP-leaning Supreme Court because, they say, the domestic partner registry is a little too much like marriage, and that it violates a 2006 state constitutional amendment that banned same-sex marriage or anything that even remotely resembles marriage equality.

And while the 4th District Court of Appeals disagreed with the right-wingnuts, and actually listed all the rights that opposite sex couples enjoy that same-sex couples don't, including joint property ownership, joint adoption and the ability to share health benefits even after a divorce, the GOP is still unhappy. And will likely stay unhappy until they make absolutely certain that gay and lesbian couples remain legally unequal. 

Members of the conservative group Wisconsin Family Action—isn’t it odd that every single anti-LGBT group feels the need to use the word family in its name?—filed a lawsuit in 2010 claiming the registry created a legal status a little too similar to marriage for same-sex couples and therefore violated the constitutional ban on gay marriage. And they did not like it. Gay folks marrying and being all equal and stuff? Well, I never…..

So, naturally, Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen refused to defend the registry, declaring it was clearly unconstitutional, which forced former Governor Jim Doyle, a Democrat, to appoint private attorneys to defend it. But when GOP asshat, wingnut and Republican Scott Walker became governor in 2011, he instantly fired those attorneys.

But, last summer, Dane County Circuit Judge Daniel Moeser ruled that the registry was constitutional and not substantially similar to marriage.

Wisconsin Family Action members appealed, and when the 4th District tried to send the case directly to the state Supreme Court, that body—dominated by conservative justices—refused to hear the case and sent it back to the appellate level. And the appeals court issued a unanimous decision, saying voters believed the marriage equality ban amendment wouldn't block benefits for same-sex couples, in part because Republicans who sponsored the amendment said as much in news releases and newspaper stories.

In fact, one of those GOP led groups that, at first seemed to support the registry, is that same Wisconsin Family Action group, whose president, Julaine Appling, wrote in an article about the marriage equality ban that legislators could consider some "legal construct ... that would give select benefits to co-habiting adults." Only now she’s saying that the registry is too much like marriage and, therefore, must go.

Flippety-flop.

It's a bit like a tennis game,, following this story, but now that it seems headed back to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, maybe this time they'll rule, and maybe this time the domestic partner registry will stick. At least until marriage equality in passed in the Land Of Cheese.

And it will pass, my friends, one day it will pass.

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