If Howard Wax and Robert Pooley Jr. were a heterosexual couple, they could've gone to their nearest Cook County clerk's office, paid $40 for a marriage license and been wed.
That would have provided them an array of legal protections -- the right to make medical decisions for one another, the ability for one to inherit the other's property.
Instead, the couple paid $10,000 for an attorney to help them roughly simulate -- using wills, trusts and powers of attorney -- the protections that marriage affords. It was a price the men, parents of 3-year-old twins, were willing to pay for peace of mind, though they admit it's far from perfect.
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Melissa Walker and Erin Ferguson had a wedding ceremony in Chicago in 2008. A couple of friends who are attorneys offered their services as a gift, helping the couple prepare powers of attorney and wills.
Now Walker is eight months pregnant and said it will cost about $2,000 for Ferguson to adopt the child, along with additional legal costs to make sure their parental rights are protected.
"Erin and I are spending thousands of dollars out of our savings account," Walker said. "How does it benefit anyone when our child is going to come into this world with a less economically sound family?"
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"There are protections under the law that would help a heterosexual couple if they didn't have those protections in place," said Christopher Clark, senior staff attorney in the Midwest Regional Office of Lambda Legal, a national gay and lesbian civil rights organization. "A same-sex couple, without these steps, has no legal protection."
Even with carefully laid-out legal plans, Clark said same-sex couples still have cause for concern: "We've had horrible situations where someone winds up in the emergency room in critical condition or even dying, and the person's partner is not allowed access to them, regardless of the documents."And there are other rights that come with marriage that same-sex couples have no way of accessing. They miss out on all manner of federal tax benefits, and the federal Defense of Marriage Act -- signed into law by President Bill Clinton -- makes it impossible for a surviving partner to receive any of their deceased partner's monthly Social Security payout. That money simply goes back to the federal government.
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"You can never create -- using private contracts -- all the same benefits and protections people have by being married," said Ray Koenig III, a Chicago attorney. "You can try hard, and you can spend a lot of money. But you'll never get there."
