National veterans cemeteries now allow same-sex spouses, but Idaho doesn't.
There's no point to this other than
outright cruelty.
Madelynn Taylor has earned the right to be buried at the Idaho Veterans Cemetery because of her six years of service in the Navy. But her now-deceased wife can't join her because state law doesn't recognize their marriage, CBS affiliate KBOI reports.
"I'm not surprised," Taylor told the station. "I've been discriminated against for 70 years, and they might as well discriminate against me in death as well as life."
The issue is with the Idaho Constitution. Because it explicitly bans same-sex marriage (and thank you for that, bigots, a bang-up job you've done there), the state Veterans Cemetery says it can't grant the request to place her own ashes, when the time comes, with her spouse, because it's not her spouse.
"It's not taking up any more space to have both of us in there, and I don't see where the ashes of a couple of old lesbians is going to hurt anybody," she said.
Really, there's not even a point to treating her this way. There's no state interest in not letting the cemetery grant the request, there's no terrible damage to Idaho that's going to be done by letting a woman be buried with the person she spent her life with, it's just mean for the sake of mean.