Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Social Security Administration today (Tuesday, Nov. 20) on behalf of a 65-year-old gay man seeking spousal survivor’s benefits based on his 43-year relationship with his husband, who died seven months after Arizona began allowing same-sex couples to marry, according to a Lambda Legal press release.
The lawsuit filed on behalf of Michael Ely in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona argues that SSA’s imposition of a nine-month marriage requirement for social security survivor’s benefits is unconstitutional where same-sex couples were not able to be married for nine months because of discriminatory marriage laws.
“The federal government is requiring surviving same-sex spouses like Michael to pass an impossible test to access benefits earned through a lifetime of work,” said Lambda Legal Counsel Peter Renn. “Michael and his husband got married as soon as they could, less than three weeks after Arizona ended its exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage, but they were only able to be married for six months before Michael’s husband died of cancer. Now, the Social Security Administration is allowing the heartbreak of discriminatory marriage bans to persist by holding same-sex couples to a standard that many could not meet, insisting that they have been married for nine months even where it was legally impossible for them to do so.”
The couple married as soon as they could.
Michael Ely and James “Spider” Taylor were in a committed relationship from 1971, when Ely was 18 and Taylor 20 years old. They moved from Southern California to Tucson in 1994. Taylor was the primary wage earner, while Ely managed their household. Although they were barred from marrying for most of their relationship, they had a commitment ceremony in 2007. When Taylor got sick, Ely was his caregiver. Social Security generally requires that couples be married for at least nine months before a spouse dies in order for the surviving spouse to qualify for survivor’s benefits, but for many same-sex couples, that was impossible.
— David Taffet
