SAN DIEGO (AP) – Late in the day, when most others have cleared the course of rolling hills and serene lakes, B. Birgit Koebke, golfs alone at her country club. If a group happens to be ahead of her, they no longer allow her to play through.

“I just sit there and wait,” she says. “They’ve made it impossible for me to enjoy the club.”

Koebke, a 47-year-old television sales executive, is a longtime member of the Bernardo Heights Country Club. She is also a lesbian, and her extended drive to win club golfing privileges for her partner of 12 years, Kendall French, has left few members willing to play with her.

Koebke hopes the California Supreme Court will hear her argument that the state’s civil rights laws should require the club to give French, her state-registered domestic partner, the same benefits given to spouses.

Bernardo Heights maintains that state law allows it to limit such privileges to legally married couples.

John Shiner, a Los Angeles attorney representing Bernardo Heights, says the club simply wishes “to make a distinction between those who are legally married and those who are not married. … I should add that this has absolutely nothing to do with sexual orientation.”

Bernardo Heights was founded in northern San Diego in the early 1980s. Koebke joined in 1986 in celebration of her 30th birthday and her professional success.

With time, she was among the members who helped end club traditions restricting play times for women and reserving the harder white tees for men.

Koebke began inviting French to the club in the early ’90s, years after they’d met through mutual friends. As the relationship grew, so did her desire to remove the guest limitations for French.

“She’s not my guest,” Koebke says. “She’s part of my family.”

Bernardo Heights allows the spouses and children of members to play golf for free. A member may bring a guest for a fee of about $70 and no more than six times each year.

The club rejected suggested compromises, such as issuing free guest passes for French. Koebke suggested it create a “significant others” category, which also could benefit widows who didn’t wish to remarry for financial or other reasons. In 1996, the club’s board of directors agreed to consider the idea, but first restricted that significant others would have to be of the opposite sex of the member. Regardless, the measure failed.

The club suggested French buy her own membership, an invitation she finds insulting. “Tell me,” she says, “how many of the other members are willing to pay double for their household?”

In 2001, Koebke filed her lawsuit. A San Diego Superior Court judge dismissed her claims in 2002. But last March, an appellate court partially overturned the ruling, ordering the trial court to consider Koebke’s claim that the club treated unmarried heterosexual couples as spouses. It rejected Koebke’s challenges of the interpretation of California’s civil rights law. The state Supreme Court is expected to announce in coming weeks whether it will hear her appeal.

French and Koebke, who are represented by Lambda Legal, would like the court to find the state’s 1959 Unruh Civil Rights Act protects them from discrimination based on marital status. Since California law bans same-sex marriage, they argue, Koebke cannot fully enjoy the benefits of her membership.

Club counsel and member Thomas Monson wrote of Koebke’s lawsuit in a 2001 letter to members saying the club was “a family oriented organization” and that the board “recognizes the State of California’s strong public policy favoring marriage.”

Koebke says she saw Monson’s statement as a personal attack against her family. Monson declined to comment for this article.

The couple, who have no children, also were jarred when the board decided to extend family benefits to members’ grandchildren without a full membership vote, which they were told was needed for any such change.

“To me, that’s saying: ‘Well, we want grandchildren to play, but for you two women, as a same-sex couple, we don’t want you to play,’” French says.

After filing her lawsuit, Koebke says the atmosphere became hostile enough that her business clients were made uncomfortable, forcing her to stop bringing them.

One former member, Judy Stillman, recalls joining Koebke for golf shortly after she and her husband joined the club about three years ago, not knowing about the conflict.

“She was delightful. She’s a great golfer, just hilariously funny and just so enjoyable,” says Stillman, 54. But after the game, she says, “within a week, four couples and quite a few people told us that if we ever played golf with her again, we wouldn’t have a friend in the club. My answer to that was we wouldn’t want to consider having them as friends anyway.”

Stillman also said she heard a large group of male members make derogatory comments as Koebke practiced, suggesting that she and French put on a sex act to raise money for the club’s legal costs.

Stillman says her complaints about such comments were ignored and that club officers refused to discuss Koebke’s case with her. Stillman said she felt the club was acting with prejudice, leading her and her husband to resign at a personal financial loss of $7,500.

Chuck Wallace, the club’s president at the time, declined to comment.

Koebke refuses to leave Bernardo Heights. Once while the couple made an appeal to a membership meeting of more than 400 people, one man asked why Koebke didn’t just go.

“And I said, ‘Well, Rosa Parks didn’t get off the bus,’” Koebke recalls.

Nationwide, clubs are divided about how to treat same-sex and unmarried couples, with about a third offering some form of benefits, according to Andrew Fortin, spokesman for the National Club Association, a Washington-based trade group of about 1,000 organizations.

Many, he says, are waiting to see what will happen with Koebke’s case.

A similar conflict is unfolding in Atlanta, where the Druid Hills Golf Club was found to violate the city’s anti-discrimination ordinance by refusing spousal benefits to a lesbian couple and a gay couple. Efforts to mediate a solution broke down in late May.

While clubs may be slow to change, Fortin notes, usually they will to keep their members satisfied and attract new members in order to survive financially.

At Bernardo Heights, the value of a membership has fallen, from the $18,000 Koebke paid to $9,500 today. Shiner said he couldn’t explain the decline.

Koebke and French can only wonder why the club has chosen to wage a costly battle rather let them play. French says, “That’s the million-dollar question: Why? There’s so many great reasons to have embraced us, and there’s only one reason not to, and that’s fear. That’s the sad part about it.”