I had the great privilege this past Sunday to speak with Laurel Hester, the lesbian police detective whose terminal cancer has embroiled her in a domestic partnership benefits controversy with the local government in Ocean County, New Jersey. Apart from a brief interview several weeks ago with the NEW YORK TIMES, this is only the second time Laurel has spoken to any media, and the first time at length, about her life and the situation in Ocean County. Over the next three days,
THE BIG GAY PICTURE will run a three-part profile of this remarkable woman.
Part One: To Make The World A Better Place
Laurel Hester has spent her whole life trying to make the world a better place. That is why the events that have followed her diagnosis with terminal lung cancer a year ago have seemed so strange to her. She assumed a lifetime spent making the world a better place for others would entitle her to a measure of fairness in her time of desperate need.
Laurel Hester was wrong.
Earlier this year, New Jersey State changed its laws to allow counties to give domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples. But Laurel's county--Ocean County--has chosen not to do so. Without those benefits, specifically her pension benefits, Laurel's partner, Stacie Andree, stands to lose their home after Laurel is gone. When the dying woman first asked the five elected "freeholders" who manage Ocean County to grant those benefits, they ignored her request for six months. Then they finally said no.
First, they said no because her same-sex relationship offended them.
Then they said no because it would cost the county too much, even though they had not a single fact to back up their claim.
The final time they didn't actually say no. Instead, during a meeting with Laurel and her supporters, they simply ran away from the wheelchair-bound woman.
Literally. Five grown men, all allegedly Christians, ran out of the meeting through a back door and left a dying woman sitting there.
Christmas is this week, and the freeholders, all Republicans, will be with their friends and family, secure in their knowledge that their loved ones are protected should they die.
Laurel, meanwhile, will spend her last Christmas--indeed, her last days--with fear over her partner's future gnawing away at her. This is her story.
You can read the entire piece over at THE BIG GAY PICTURE