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No Privacy for Domestic Partners Yesterday I attended a presentation by Nancy Palikoff and it was a great
presentation with discussions about valuing our families however we define our
families. She mentioned that in Washington we have some sort of health care
directive available on our Secretary of State's page, that easily allows us to
designate the person who we want to make medical decisions for us in the event
that we are in need. So I logged on to try to find this (no luck - we'll see if
the state librarians can help). While I was there I went to the domestic partnership page and saw that it had
a domestic partnership look-up. It did. Oh it gets better - you can look by
first name or last name. Yup, from the comfort of Chocolati I looked up all my
Washington state exes and I know which ones are DPed and which ones aren't (okay
I talk to them enough that I already knew this - but that's not the point). So I of course had to check it out - and for your heterosexual marriages - those are done by county, and at least in King County I see no way that you can type something online. I submitted a question there as well to see what exactly you would have to do to see if someone where in a heterosexual marriage. Already - it's a ton harder. When I got the information about how to look it up, for heterosexuals, you have to to a click to agree that you're not going to be using the information for nefarious purposes. I decided to look up law professors who I knew to be married. It took about four tries before I came up with one married in King County. So let's recap, if you want to find information about a married person in
Washington, you'll have to know the county they live in, you'll have to email
the County records folks and see if they have that access somewhere online (or
maybe you'll have better success doing an online search for it). Then you'll
have to agree to not use it for nefarious purposes. Oh and this is if they
were married in Washington. If they weren't married in Washington, there's
no requirement that they refile in Washington, so you'll have no access to the
information. For a same-sex couple, you have a general look-up with no
little request to not use the information for nefarious purposes. And if
the couple was registered somewhere else, well that doesn't matter because
thanks to our baby DOMA, they'd likely have to re-register in Washington. Here's my thing - in a society where being gay still has many negative
repercussions what idiot thought it should be that easy to find out who was a
domestic partner? Why on earth is it online? You should have the card in your
wallet, so it's not like maybe there's some benefit that the hospital could look
it up online and have proof of your relationship. But let's just say we lived in a world without discrimination - I don't think
any records should be that easy to find. I would be unhappy if you could go to
one centralized state page and find out all sorts of information about the
straight person's marital status. Seriously, just because the technology
exists doesn't mean that it should be used. 4/29/08; Rev 7/11/08 |