Moved with partner, woman asks jobless pay

HARRISBURG - For Joan Procito, the only thing separating her from anyone else in a legally recognized marriage is a piece of paper.

But it's precisely that document - a marriage license - that has led the former Drexel Hill resident to Commonwealth Court. Her case once again raises the question of whether same-sex couples in long-term, committed relationships are entitled to some of the same benefits that heterosexual married couples enjoy.

In Procito's case, the benefit she is seeking is unemployment compensation, which she was denied after she quit her job last year to follow her partner of eight years to Florida.

The reason for the denial: She is not married.

Procito's rebuttal: She didn't have that option. Pennsylvania does not allow same-sex marriages.

"The decision was profoundly unfair and clearly erroneous," Procito's attorney, Katie Eyer, said at a hearing yesterday on the matter before a three-judge panel in Commonwealth Court.

Under Pennsylvania law, if people can show they have a necessary and compelling reason to leave their job, they could be eligible to collect unemployment benefits.

That law has been interpreted over the years to include people who voluntarily leave their jobs to follow their spouses to a new location. It is known as follow-the-spouse doctrine.

From the perspective of the state's Unemployment Compensation Board of Review, which denied Procito unemployment last year, the case was fundamentally a simple one: Procito wasn't married.

And the follow-the-spouse doctrine does not apply to unmarried couples, regardless of gender, ethnicity or race, the board's attorney, Gerard M. Mackarevich, argued yesterday.

"It would be madness for the board to side with" Procito, Mackarevich told the court.

Eyer, of Equality Advocates Pennsylvania, said Procito left her job as a financial manager last spring to move to Florida to be with her partner, Mary Jo Sheller. Sheller was relocating in order to be closer to her disabled son, who was starting college there.

Like many married couples, Procito is arguing, she and Sheller shared an emotional as well as a financial bond: They lived together and raised children together, and they shared a bank account as well as real estate. They also named each other beneficiaries in their wills and life-insurance policies.

Procito, Eyer said yesterday, had compelling reasons to move to Florida. There was no way, for instance, that she could commute more than 1,100 miles to be with her partner.

And, according to her complaint, she acted as a stepmother to Sheller's son - and needed to move in order to continue to provide the support he was used to from her.

In an interview yesterday, Eyer said that courts in some states have allowed administrative bodies to consider other factors in determining whether same-sex couples constitute a family unit, including shared wills and bank accounts.

But Mackarevich countered in court that it is unreasonable to ask the Unemployment Compensation Board to do so, since it would be treating unmarried same-sex couples differently from their unmarried heterosexual counterparts.

"How can the Unemployment Compensation Board of Review pick and choose between people to decide whether they are sufficiently intermingled to qualify as legally married?" he asked.

There is no deadline by which the court has to decide the case.

Eyer and others said yesterday that it is difficult to predict the impact, if any, a decision will have on the issue of providing benefits to same-sex couples in Pennsylvania.

"It depends on what the court rules, and how they word" the ruling, said Stacey Sobel, executive director of Equality Advocates Pennsylvania.

Larry Frankel, legislative director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said "these are the types of legal issues that courts are going to be facing more and more - all sorts of family situations which same-sex couples are involved in.

"And the courts," said Frankel, "are going to have to sort through how to treat them."