Via Box Turtle Bulletin…

R.I. Senate votes to extend funeral rights to domestic partners

At a hearing earlier this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected too because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”

After struggling for years with depression, he said, Hanby took his own life.

Try to picture Goldberg’s state of mind right then.  The death of the one you love is hard enough, but this was a suicide.  He must have been absolutely devastated.  But then, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex.  So now is just the right time to twist the knife in his heart…to make sure he knows how much he is hated.

Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”

He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.

After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.

“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.” 

They treated this man, this grieving lover, like so much human garbage.  And without a doubt they all did it, every single mother fucking one of them in this chain of events, with a sense of moral righteousness.

The right to bury the one you loved, and shared a life together with, is just one out of the great plenty of rights heterosexual couples take for granted every single day.  It is a safe bet, none safer, that a lot of folks in Rhode Island think extending even that one to gay people is far too much.  Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…