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A tragic loss, lost in the cause
© St. Petersburg Times, Tampa police officer Mickie Mashburn has decided to give herself a promotion. She has made herself A Cause. When the cop she had lived with for 10 years, Lois Marrero, was killed in the line of duty early in July, Mashburn pushed aside the gay rights groups that wanted to side with her. Even her lawyer said he was refusing their calls. Mashburn struck a noble pose. Dressed in black, she was a character out of a hip cop show with the gay twist Steve Bochco would appreciate. I bought it. Many people bought it. Then the fault lines appeared in Mashburn's picture. Marrero had never signed over her pension benefits to Mashburn. The romance may have been on the rocks. Marrero loved somebody else. Marrero and Mashburn had debts. Mashburn might even be in danger of losing her job because she had been injured in a bike accident. Mashburn did not like any of this being disclosed. She stopped talking to the Times reporter, Amy Herdy, who first reported it -- as if her snub could solve Mashburn's sudden crisis. It was time to call in the script doctors. Equality Florida, the gay rights group, showed up instead to tell the Tampa Police and Fire Pension Board on Tuesday that it would violate Florida's civil rights laws to deny Mashburn a pension that normally would go to a cop's widow. The board followed the law. The women were not married. The money went into Marrero's estate. Mashburn's lawyers promised a fight. They will fight the pension board, then in probate court. This is when matters will get uncomfortable for Mickie Mashburn. Marrero died without a will to explain how her estate was to be divided. The law gives the money automatically then to her parents. Not Mashburn. So she will have the unpleasant job of fighting a family that lost its daughter. Not a task that will score her a lot of points. In probate court, she will lose the veneer of A Cause. She will look only like somebody with her hand out. Mashburn needs the gay rights groups as protective cover so she can keep looking like A Cause. Her story otherwise is like most people's stories, complicated and low on heroics. When the probate fight is over it will move to civil court, and the appellate courts, and maybe even the Legislature, where the conservatives see danger in every corner, and certainly under the marriage bed. Almost as soon as he entered the Legislature 41/2 years ago, Tampa Bay's own, Johnny Byrd, R-Plant City, got a law passed banning gay marriage. Byrd has been on the fast track ever since. Next year he will be speaker of the state House, where the idea of Mickie Mashburn as A Cause will have the majority rolling in the aisles. Many issues have them rolling in the aisles in the Legislature, or looking away. The fairness of the death penalty, since some people's lives are on the line, for one. Testing schoolchildren rather than educating them, for one. If we wanted to fix things, we could start here. I would. I would not start by trying to change the law against gay marriage. It isn't going to happen in a very long time, and if Mickie Mashburn wanted to retain any credibility, she and her backers would turn down the volume. They would think twice about how unrelenting a fight they intend to wage, that if it gets loud and long enough, the cop who died at the hands of a bank robber will be utterly forgotten. "Lois would want this," Mashburn said of her getting Marrero's pension. I did not know Lois Marrero, but if she was like the rest of us, she would not have wanted to be a stick figure in A Cause. She would have wanted, simply, to be remembered.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone From the Times Metro desk |
