Soon after New York adopted equal marriage, the Rhode Island legislature passed a civil unions bill that accords gay and lesbian couples all the rights and responsibilities of marriage except the name. The law was adopted as a compromise after a same-sex marriage bill stalled in the state senate. Because the civil unions bill contained expansive religious exemptions, many glbtq activists urged Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee to veto the legislation.

However, on July 2, 2011, Governor Chafee, a supporter of same-sex marriage, signed the civil unions bill into law, defending it as an incremental step toward the goal of marriage equality.

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Other States

A few other states--such as Maryland, Maine, and Colorado--also offer a handful of rights to same-sex couples, but fall short of the rights conferred by domestic partnerships, civil unions, or marriage.

In addition, a number of cities and counties offer domestic partner registries through which gay and lesbian couples may qualify for a limited number of benefits.

Defense of Marriage Acts

When Mayor Newsom created a firestorm by permitting same-sex marriage in San Francisco in 2004, some gay advocates expressed concern that his actions may have hurt the cause of marriage equality. Indeed, President Bush referred to San Francisco and Massachusetts when he announced his decision to support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

But the sight of thousands of loving couples, many of whom had been together for decades, sharing vows and joining in marriage also did much to energize the proponents of same-sex marriage. San Francisco's decision to issue licenses to same-sex couples in 2004, while perhaps not of lasting legal significance, provided huge symbolic support for marriage equality and eventually resulted in the historic California Supreme Court ruling of 2008.

Recently there have been encouraging signs of the increasing acceptance of same-sex marriage. Indeed, in 2011, three separate polls have shown that a bare majority of Americans support marriage equality.

But the achievement of marriage equality has been made more difficult by the Republican Party's routine use of same-sex marriage as a "wedge issue" by which to energize its base. Following the Hawaii decision in 1993, for example, states rushed to pass so-called "Defense of Marriage" Acts, which limit marriage to opposite-sex couples and bar recognition of any same-sex marriage or civil union from another state. Currently, more than 40 states have ordinances or constitutional amendments that limit marriage (and the recognition of out-of-state marriages) to opposite-sex couples.

The federal government passed its own Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, signed by President Clinton at midnight symbolically, if feebly, to express his disapproval. The Act defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman for all federal marital benefits and allows states to ignore the Full Faith and Credit Clause when dealing with same-sex marriages and civil unions licensed elsewhere. The constitutionality of the federal and state Defense of Marriage Acts is open to challenge, although given the conservatism of the current federal courts, such a challenge may be doomed to failure.

In the 2004 general election, 13 states passed constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. In the 2006 general election, another seven states adopted constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage. However, in some of these states--Virginia and Wisconsin, for example--the 2006 amendments only barely passed, and in one state, Arizona, it failed, while in Colorado an amendment creating domestic partnerships almost passed.

What is especially disturbing about these amendments is that many of them ban not just same-sex marriage, but all forms of state recognition of same-sex couples. The Michigan amendment, for example, was interpreted by the Michigan Attorney General to mean that municipalities may not extend domestic partnership health care benefits to same-sex couples, an interpretation upheld by the state's conservative Supreme Court.

Amendments this sweeping may, however, be subject to attack under the United States Supreme Court's decision in Romer v. Evans. A federal district court in Nebraska struck down that state's extreme anti-marriage amendment under Romer v. Evans, though it was reinstated by a federal appeals court, and is now being appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court.

As more liberal judges are appointed to the federal judiciary by President Obama, and as more states permit same-sex marriage, an appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court challenging the Defense of Marriage Act is likely.

Two significant decisions from Massachusetts in July 2010 may provide the vehicle for invalidating DOMA in the United States Supreme Court. In these cases, brought respectively by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders on behalf of individual plaintiffs who had suffered loss of benefits because of DOMA and by the Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Judge Joseph L. Tauro, a federal district judge, declared Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional.

This section of the 1996 law defines marriage as exclusively heterosexual for federal purposes. Judge Tauro, relying heavily on such Supreme Court rulings as Romer v. Evans and Lawrence v. Texas, ruled that this section violates the Fifth Amendment's equal protection principles and the Tenth Amendment's reservation of unenumerated powers to the states.

These rulings, if upheld on appeal to the First Circuit and then accepted for review by the Supreme Court, could well lead to the invalidation of DOMA. Significantly for the prospects of success in the federal courts, in 2011 the Obama administration announced that the Justice Department will no longer defend the consitutionality of DOMA.

European Registered Partnerships

The United States lags a good deal behind many other countries with regard to recognizing same-sex unions. Denmark was the first country in the world to enact a registered partnership law for same-sex couples in 1989. Norway was next in 1993, and then Sweden (1995), Iceland (1996), and the Netherlands (1998). The Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Swedish partnership acts are available to same-sex couples only, while the Dutch law is available to same-sex and opposite sex couples.

In November 2000, the German Parliament (Bundestag) authorized "Life Partnerships." This action extended to gay and lesbian couples virtually all the rights that heterosexual couples enjoy, including the right to the same surnames, hospital visitation rights, rights as next of kin in medical decisions, some parental rights over the other partner's children, inheritance rights regarding health insurance and pensions, and so on, though not the right to adopt.