In California, gay and lesbian couples are learning that even when an alternative purports to offer all the rights of marriage, the word ‘marriage’ itself has a substantive meaning.

California’s domestic partnership law already confers most of the same legal rights on gay couples as heterosexual married people, said professor Lawrence Levine of the McGeorge School of Law. Still, he said, marriage opens doors that domestic partnership does not.

“There is a shared understanding of what the word ‘marriage’ means in our culture,” said Levine. “There is a huge psychic difference between that word and the phrase ‘domestic partnership.’ ”

Even though the latter has legal heft in California, many people are unfamiliar with it, and as a result domestic partners may be denied their rights, Levine said.

Domestic partnerships aren’t even an alternative in New York.  If a couple wishes to marry, they must travel to Canada, Connecticut, Massachusets, Vermont, Iowa or Maine.