Civil Unions In N.H. Not a Big Deal, And That's a Good Thing

Wednesday was the first day same-sex couples could obtain state-recognized civil unions in New Hampshire. The day passed somewhat uneventfully, and that's a good thing. More about that in this editorial from the Boston Globe:

WHEN VERMONT legislators legalized civil unions for gay couples in 2000,
there was a bitter backlash against the reform. But on New Year's Day, New
Hampshire joined Vermont, Connecticut, and New Jersey in extending civil union
rights to gay and lesbian couples, and the event was met with a collective yawn.
There are several reasons for this change, but the most important is that
residents of New Hampshire have had a chance to observe Vermont and
Connecticut's civil unions and Massachusetts' same-sex marriage, and realized
that extending rights to a minority is no threat to the majority - or to the
institution of marriage.
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But the strongest factor making civil unions such a non-issue in New
Hampshire has to be the opportunity the state has had to look elsewhere in New
England, where experience shows that legal recognition of same sex couples has
stabilized and strengthened those relationships without doing anything to weaken
heterosexual marriage. Like other civil union laws, New Hampshire's grants gays
property rights, shared wills, and hospital visitation privileges. Several other
states have created varying levels of rights in domestic partnership laws.

As beneficial as these protections are, they still confer a separate
status, as the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made clear in 2003 when it
ruled that the state's constitution prohibited the Commonwealth from denying
full marriage rights to gays. So far, no other state has joined Massachusetts,
but it is still gratifying to see that in New England, the region with the most
experience in granting rights to same-sex couples, another state has recognized
the profound unfairness in withholding those rights.

There have been plenty of negative things said about civil unions from advocates of full marriage rights for same-sex couples, but there is a very positive trend developing.....as civil unions become more normalized in states across the nation, the leap to fully legalized marriage becomes shorter and, theoretically, more attainable.