Six same-sex couples ask N.J.'s top court for permission to wed | - NJ.com

Six same-sex couples ask N.J.'s top court for permission to wed | - NJ.com

alling the state’s civil unions law a failed experiment, six same-sex couples yesterday asked the state Supreme Court to grant them the right to marry.

"What we have lived for the last three years is that civil unions are not equal to marriage," Cindy Meneghin of Butler said in an interview before Lambda Legal announced it is reviving its case before the Supreme Court.

In 2006, the state’s high court ruled in Lewis vs. Harris that lesbian and gay couples deserve the same rights as married heterosexuals. Later that year, state lawmakers legalized civil unions, which were to confer all the benefits of marriage on same-sex couples without using the term "marriage."


But representatives of Lambda Legal, gay rights advocacy group Garden State Equality and the six couples said that’s not what’s happened. Instead, they said, they have been treated differently because they are called something different.

Hayley Gorenberg, deputy legal director for Lambda Legal, said reams of testimony collected by the Civil Unions Review Commission support their contention.

An effort to legalize same-sex marriage failed in the state Senate in January. That triggered yesterday’s return to the Supreme Court.

Opponents like John Tomicki of the Coalition to Preserve and Protect Marriage said his group believes marriage can only be between one man and one woman. He added that same-sex couples already have the same rights through civil unions and durable power of attorney, and he said the testimony the civil unions commission collected is anecdotal and not proved.

"They’ll have to order it back to a trial court, we believe, to establish a record," Tomicki said.

Meneghin said she and Maureen Kilian, both 52, have been together since high school, but their relationship is not recognized on levels ranging from the mundane to the life-threatening.

Meneghin was taken to the hospital 12 years ago with menengitis, but Kilian was not allowed to be by her side until Meneghin shouted out that Kilian had power of attorney. Last summer, when doctors thought Meneghin had appendicitis and again hospitalized her, the nurses didn’t understand Kilian’s civil union rights.

"I got the same blank stares," Meneghin said. "The bottom line is marriage has meaning that civil unions will never have."