Gay marriage is legal: So now what?

“There are many things people are going to have to do after their celebration is over,” said Ronald Zack, Tucson attorney and board member with Wingspan, a community organization supporting the LGBT community in Southern Arizona.

Estate planning

Zack recommends scheduling a meeting with a financial planner, tax adviser and estate-planning attorney. Long-time same-sex couples often have worked out ways to make their partnership as “marriage-like” as possible to ensure their partner will be the beneficiary of inheritances and pension plans, Zack said. After the court ruling, planning will be simpler, but couples may want to revisit some earlier decisions and plan to merge more assets, he said. For example, some couples may own real estate as joint tenants with right of survivorship. Once married, they could consider changing that to community property with right of survivorship, which could provide advantages for capital gains taxes. They could also change property agreements from separate to community.

Filing taxes

Filing taxes should be easier now. Before, if a same-sex couple was married in a different state, then moved to Arizona, federal law would recognize the marriage even if the state did not. That meant the couple had to file federal and state taxes differently, said Jennifer Pizer, director of the law and public policy project at Lambda Legal’s Western regional office in Los Angeles. Now, in Arizona, state and federal law will be in agreement.

Adoption law

While some attorneys think Arizona’s adoption law will automatically allow gay couples to jointly adopt children, the actual wording of the state’s law says only husband and wife can jointly adopt. Zack says this wording will have to be changed to ensure that married gays get equal consideration at adoption agencies. Today, same-sex couples are unable to adopt jointly and only one parent is the legal guardian.

If a couple splits up , or if one parent dies, the other parent can be left with no parental rights. “That’s created huge problems,” Zack said.

The Arizona Department of Child Safety, which oversees adoptions, would defer to the courts and legal experts on the issue, said Jennifer Bowser, spokeswoman for the department.

Hospital visitation

Same-sex couples who get married will automatically have the same rights as heterosexual married couples in terms of hospital visitation, lawyers say. Equal treatment should already be the case: In 2010, President Obama mandated that hospitals receiving federal dollars allow hospital visitation for gay partners and respect patients’ wishes about who they want making medical decisions for them.

The mandate came after a lesbian couple was denied visitation by a Florida hospital. One of the women had a brain aneurysm, and her long-time partner was not allowed to see her before she died. But discrimination persists when hospital staff are unaware of that mandate or just “aren’t thinking of same-sex couples as families,” Pizer said. “That’s the overwhelming significance of this litigation and this insistence that same-sex couples and their families be treated like other families.”

Social Security/veterans’ benefits

Some same-sex couples have struggled to access benefits after their partner died because of rules requiring couples be married for a certain length of time — one year to get V.A. benefits and nine months for Social Security. Couples who marry now in Arizona could face barriers if their partner dies soon, Pizer said. This situation may require litigation to sort out, she says

The argument will be that the government can’t deny benefits based on a too-short marriage when it was the government denying the couple the right to marry.

“The good news is that eliminating this discrimination makes life so much simpler for everyone,” she said.

Marriage licenses

Pima County Superior Cour began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples on Friday for $76.