The fight for marriage equality is often dismissed as a cultural one, or somehow only of interest to well-off people. Robert is fond of pointing out that it’s fundamentally an economic issue, and pretty often a story comes along to prove his point. Via Americablog, here’s an example of why marriage matters:

When lung cancer finally kills Laurel Hester — and it will, in a matter of months — she wants to know that her domestic partner, Stacie Andree, won’t lose their home in Point Pleasant.

That legacy, however, is in doubt.

Ocean County’s freeholders have refused to act on a request from Hester, an investigator for 23 years in the county prosecutor’s office, to provide domestic partner benefits for gay and lesbian employees under a state law enacted last year. Without a resolution by the freeholders, her pension benefits cannot go to Andree.

As is often the case, the city council (called “freeholders”, apparently) is using economic justifications for prejudice.

Ocean County’s freeholders have said that adopting domestic partnership benefits is cost prohibitive, although administrator Alan Avery said the county has not formally studied the issue and doesn’t have actual cost figures.

At least one freeholder, John P. Kelly, the law and public safety chairman, has cited moral reservations, telling the Asbury Park Press it violates “the sanctity of marriage.”

With nearly two dozen colleagues from the prosecutor’s office there for support, Hester went to the board’s regular meeting last month and publicly appealed to the five freeholders, all Republicans.

The freeholders took the matter under advisement. At their meeting last week, the freeholders said they had discussed the matter in executive session and chose not to act.

No formal vote was taken, Avery said, because it was unnecessary. “The only vote that can occur is an affirmative vote,” he said, “and there’s no support for it to pass.”

Hey, Dianne, this is why marriage matters.