dojN001410.xml

dojN001410.xml

born-digital

email

yes

no

2002-01-07

Monday, January 07, 2002 12:05 PM
Protect the rights of Domestic Partners



Dear Mr. Zwick,
I am writing you out of concern for the "domestic partners" of the victims of the tragic events of September 11th. Will fiancees and other domestic partners be eligible for compensation from this fund? Would it not be reasonable to follow the guidelines of international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International? What about the eligibility requirements already set up by the New York State World Trade Center Relief Fund?
Obviously, a person would have to show documentation to prove him or herself as the "domestic partner" of a victim. The documentation permitted would include documents like insurance policies, bank and credit accounts, leases and mortgages, health insurance policies, that is documents that a casual partner would not in a million years be able to produce.
This is not the time to impose a political agenda or ideology on the life-styles that a particular victim had chosen. There were plenty of people living together in long-term common-law marriages that lost their life partner on that day, and it would not be right to by-pass them for the benefit of whoever the closest living relative is.
To illustrate one of these cases, I would like to share my own perspective with you: on 9-11 I lost my fiance, and with him the children we were planning to raise and the life we had been planning and building for years, and which we should have been enjoying for another 50 years or so. What should have been the happiest few months of my life, as I was planning our wedding for New Year's Eve (which would have also been my fiances 35th birthday) was in an instant turned into a period of grief and anguish beyond words. The bureaucratic problems I have been running into since my fiance and myself were not married yet, are nightmarish. I should also mention that his parents are deceased and the person considered his next-of-kin is an estranged sister with whom he has not had any contact for years and whom I have never met even though me and my fiance had been living together for the last four years.
I do not think it is just or fair in any way to annull the decisions that individual victims had made in regards to their own lives. It is not reasonable to expect that the victims should have had wills made out, since the majority of them were much to young to think about this type of issues. It is fair to push aside the fiancees and domestic partners of these people just because they were not yet married or because they choose to live together un-married or because of their sexual orientation. This fund should be looking to compensate the family of the victim, and I think that the person you wake up with and go to bed with every day for years, the person that you make a promise of marriage to, the person that you share the expenses of your daily life with as well as plan a future with, is more of a family than someone you share some genetic charcteristic with but not much else.
I hope that you will take my perspective and thoughts on this into consideration. Even though every situation and set of circumstances is unique, I know for a fact that I am far from the only person in this type of situation. I hope that you will be able to come up with a set of reasonable eligibility requirements for this compensation that will not exclude the "domestic partners" of the victims, but rather strive to accomplish basic fairness which would take into account the individual circumstances of each "victim" remembering that every single one of them was a person with a different cultural, ethnic, religious and ideological back-ground.
Thank you,


Individual Comment

New York, NY

2002-01-07