A pending legal case was brought to our attention this week by LGBT civil rights group the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) in which SF resident David Reed is suing the parent company of local TV station KRON 4, Young Broadcasting, over the denial of spousal benefits from his late husband's pension plan.

Reed began dating his partner of a decade and a half, Donald Lee Gardner, in 1998, and the two became domestic partners in the state of California in 2004 — the same year that gay couples were briefly able to be married at San Francisco City Hall. As NCLR attorney Amy Whelan and Reed's attorney Teresa Renaker argue in a complaint filed Tuesday in federal court in SF, while Reed and Gardner were not technically married at the time that Gardner retired in 2009, they were under state law entitled to all the benefits and protections of married couples, and under federal retirement law (ERISA) KRON 4 was obligated to extend spousal benefits from the company pension plan to Gardner's domestic partner, Reed, whom Human Resources at the station long knew to be Gardner's longtime partner.

According to the complaint, Gardner indicated at the time of his retirement that he was single and not married on a pension plan form, but the attorneys argue that this was invalid in light of state domestic partnership law. Also, "Nothing in the KRON [Pension] Plan limits the term “spouse” or “married” to opposite-sex spouses."

Gardner subsequently passed away from a rare blood disease in 2014 just five days after legally marrying Reed, and immediately thereafter his pension benefits ceased.

Efforts to argue his case as Gardner's legal partner from years before his retirement have been unsuccessful, so Reed is now going to federal court.

Says Whelan, in a release, "The Plan needs to abide by its promises and provide this much needed benefit to David. It is shocking that a San Francisco-based company and a California Plan would discriminate against its employees and their partners in this way. There is absolutely no defense in this case."

And, says Reed's attorney, Renaker, "Federal law requires pension plans to follow their written terms, and there is no question that David and Donald must be treated as spouses under the clear language of the plan."

Reed also gave a statement, saying, "My husband and I did everything we could to protect one another. Words cannot describe the grief of losing the person you planned to spend the rest of your life beside. While I mourned his loss, I was devastated by KRON 4’s refusal to recognize our relationship and to pay the benefits that Donald earned during his long service to KRON 4 in order to protect our family."

It remains to be seen how KRON 4 will respond, or if this matter will go further in federal court, but the case is sure to highlight some of the awkward vagaries around spousal benefits when they pertain to gay and lesbian partnerships established during the legal gray-area period of the last decade in California and elsewhere.

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