PERRY: Party pooper — Civil unions are just the bride of Frankenstein

I just wasn’t feeling the joy last week when Gov. John Hickenlooper stuck a pen in the eye of bigots and signed Colorado’s epic civil unions bill into law.

I know. “Bigot” is a harsh word. But then bigotry is a harsh thing. Don’t kid yourself. Those who think gays and lesbians shouldn’t have the exact same rights and privileges as do heterosexuals are blatant bigots. They justify their bigotry by hiding behind their religion, their traditions or their politics.

The arguments that these bigots use to defend their discrimination are the same arguments that bigots from previous generations used to enslave black and Chinese Americans, abuse women and Native Americans, and prevent interracial marriage. Imagine the public outrage if state officials were to refuse to issue a marriage license to a couple of mixed race. Just as NASA was gearing up for the Apollo moonshot in 1967, 14 states were still being hammered for laws prohibiting the nuptials of blacks and whites.

Yes, really.

Bigots. Racial bigots. Some of the worst kind. But there are plenty of others, and right now some bigots just can’t stop themselves when it comes to having to treat gay and lesbian citizens equally, as the U.S. Constitution demands.

The stupidest argument I hear against treating gays equally is that they, like straights, are equally able to marry someone of the opposite sex. As if marriage were nothing more than something akin to choosing a college, picking a house or looking for a job. The same argument was used against mixed-race couples just a few space-races ago: Blacks can choose their own kind, just like whites can. Uh huh.

So while so much of the community that wants to end discrimination against gays was celebrating that at long last, the state would recognize who they really were, and who they chose for romantic, legal partners, I was fuming.

Civil unions are not marriages. I think it’s great that the gay community was able to take a giant leap forward — right into a locked door. Civil unions are the modern equivalent of allowing women to vote in just some elections; not the presidential race. It’s the same as prohibiting cities from keeping blacks from sitting anywhere they want in some restaurants, but not the best ones.

Colorado’s civil unions bill is just bigotry light.

Consider this, no matter how civilly unionized a gay couple is in Colorado, they miss out on 1,049 express federal rights and privileges that married heterosexual couples enjoy. They get things like, income tax breaks, estate tax breaks, COBRA rights, Social Security benefits and — and — and 1,045 more.

What’s more, a gay couple may be living the married-light life here in Colorado, but if they go to a state like Texas, Florida, Utah or Arizona, they’re just two homosexuals sharing a room.

This shameless bigotry not only causes very real, very expensive and very insulting heartaches for gay couples, it also causes everyday stupid stuff, too.

Like if you’re filling out the endless forms humans are required to ink week in and week out of their lives, especially if their lives are attached to children, which box do you choose under marital status? Single? Divorced? Or married? None of the above? Second-class marriage? Pick the wrong one on college financial aid or passport forms and you’ve committed criminal fraud.

And so the second stupidest argument I frequently hear is that most Americans may be concerned about ending this bigotry, but they’re really not affected by it. It’s just a few noisy gays making trouble for everyone.

In California alone, there are almost 50,000 children who live in a family of two, same-sex parents who have real problems with working around this state-sanctioned bigotry. Big problems about guardianship. Small problems such as, who’s the mom, and who’s the dad?

Despite the outlandishly stupid comment by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito this week that gay marriage is simply too new to consider, the problem of gay bigotry has a long, hateful history in this country. I can only hope it won’t take another century or a civil war to get people like Alito to see how deeply wrong and damaging their bigotry is.

The time to right this wrong is now. Civil unions got Colorado to the door, but only sanctioning gay marriage here and across the country will get us all through it.

Reach editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or [email protected]