Opinion: Same-sex Social Security benefits? Not while DOMA lives

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U.S. Rep. Linda T. Sánchez (D-Lakewood) is proposing that the Social Security Administration provide benefits now received by heterosexual married couples to gays and lesbians in civil unions or domestic partnerships. One advocacy group contends that the exclusion of same-sex couples from such benefits has cost them more than $2 billion in the last decade, a conjecture that may or may not bear close analysis. What is clear is that the Social Security system is unfair to same-sex couples.

Sánchez’s proposal, which has yet to be offered as legislation, is unlikely to advance very far. At a time when Social Security is on increasingly shaky fiscal footing, Congress isn’t likely to be receptive to new categories of benefits or beneficiaries -- even when, as in this case, the new entitlements would be a drop in a nearly $700-billion annual bucket. But there is a more straightforward, principled and perhaps even cheaper way to remedy the injustice: It’s called same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, because of a statute known as the Defense of Marriage Act, even same-sex couples who can be married in their home states are denied spousal Social Security benefits.

DOMA, as it’s known, was signed by President Clinton in 1996 and says: “In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.” Thus, even if same-sex marriage were legal in every state of the Union, same-sex couples would be ineligible for the benefits that flow from marriage including the upward adjustment in benefits a widow or widower receives when a spouse with more generous benefits dies.

Allowing spousal benefits for domestic partners -- without using the word “spouse,” of course -- might be a stopgap solution to the inequity Sanchez decries. But a Congress that won’t repeal DOMA isn’t likely to make other concessions to same-sex couples.

-- Michael McGough