ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) – Maryland lawmakers show no signs of budging on same-sex marriage, but gay-rights groups are working little by little to level the playing field between married heterosexual couples and same-sex couples in domestic partnerships.

Last year, state legislators passed bills that allow same-sex partners who meet certain criteria to make medical and burial decisions for each other, and make domestic partners eligible for tax benefits that married people currently get when transferring property.

This year, gay-rights advocates, including the organization Equality Maryland, have their sights set on the inheritance tax: Activists want same-sex domestic partners who own homes together to be exempt from the hefty state taxes assessed on property when one person dies.

“Should that be the case where you have to literally pay to stay in your own home because your loved one died?” bill co-sponsor Sen. Richard Madaleno, D-Montgomery, said. “No other family member would be put in that situation.”

There is no inheritance tax on property passing to spouses, children, parents, grandparents, stepchildren or stepparents and siblings under current Maryland law. Other people, however, would pay a 10 percent tax on the property’s value. Domestic partners who co-own a home, for example, would pay a 10 percent tax on half the home’s value if their partner dies.

The Senate Budget and Taxation committee voted 9-6 April 1 to bring a bill to the full Senate that would add same-sex domestic partners to the list of family members who can inherit homes without paying inheritance taxes. The exemption would only apply to the couple’s primary residence and the property must be jointly owned for the survivor to get the tax break.

Equality Maryland leaders acknowledge the bill’s not same-sex marriage itself, but say the measure’s important for people like Michael Lacey. The Montgomery County resident unexpectedly lost 24-year partner Ira Kaye last summer in an accident in which Kaye was pinned between two cars in the couple’s garage.

Lacey said he has to pay inheritance taxes in excess of $30,000 to stay in the home he co-owned with Kaye and shared with their adopted middle-school son.

“You’re talking about a year of my son’s college education savings down the tubes,” Lacey said, adding that the couple had moved from Virginia to Maryland in 2006 because of the state’s more progressive politics.

“I have no issue paying taxes but if you’re going to tax me,” Lacey said, “then please give me the same services you would give any other citizen.”

Republican Sen. David Brinkley, R-Frederick, voted against the bill in committee but credits Maryland gay-rights groups for what he called “creeping incrementalism.”

“There’s been no success in confronting same-sex marriage, civil unions or anything else head-on here, so therefore their strategy, which is a wise one because it’s working, is to chip around the outside,” Brinkley said. He voted against the exemption, he said, because he opposes the inheritance tax in general and would rather do away with it altogether than provide breaks for same-sex domestic partners but not other categories, like cousins.

Supporters of the legislation say the measure is increasingly necessary as the country sees more and more same-sex couples comfortably living public existences, jointly owning homes and growing old together.

“No matter how you might feel about the subject,” Madaleno said, “should somebody be put out of their house because we don’t have the political will to recognize their relationship?”

Only Massachusetts and Connecticut allow same-sex couples to marry. Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire and several other states allow civil unions, and, like Maryland, a few others – including Hawaii – have extended some spousal benefits to domestic partners.

Marilee Lindemann, director of the University of Maryland’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies program, has been with her partner for 25 years and they’ve co-owned a home in Takoma Park since 1994. The 50-year-old Lindemann says she and her partner are “on the leading edge of a generation of same-sex couples” that were “in relatively safe positions” to “function pretty much as married couples.”

Lindemann sees the bill as one way of “getting rid of the taxes on being gay.”

“If we’re not going to allow people access to marriage, and it doesn’t seem many states are willing to do that, we have to find other ways to address obvious inequities,” Lindemann said.

State analysts say a 2006 census study estimated roughly 0.7 percent of Maryland.