Those benefits included more than 1,000 federal protections and privileges, such as the legal recognition of relationships, access to a partner's employment benefits, rights of inheritance, joint tax returns and tax exemptions, immigration or residency for noncitizen partners, next-of-kin status, protection from domestic violence, and the right to live together in military or college housing.
Consider the risks of leaving wealth outright even to grown children and these benefits of using inheritance trusts to hold bequests for them.
Educating them about the possible benefits, including matters of inheritance and Social Security, would help them and their children.
The United Kingdom last year, for example, granted gay couples extensive rights of inheritance, tax benefits and more.
Many retirees enjoy the lifestyle there, and will benefit from the continued lack of inheritance or wealth taxes.
This can also have the benefit of changing the amount of inheritance tax due, but only if done within two years of the date of death.
Rich newspapers here incite their poor readers to demand abolition of inheritance tax to benefit the proprietor, while blaming the poor for being welfare spongers.
Corporate tax cuts and benefits to the rich, including the abolition of inheritance tax, would remain.
Ms. Hess noted that the couple, of Cambridge, Mass., were ineligible for the income and inheritance tax benefits of married couples.
And as it grapples, it is finding that what had seemed at first obvious middle ground -- a domestic partnership system that would offer all the benefits of marriage, like insurance and inheritance rights, without the title -- has few backers at this point.
