Posted by Dale Carpenter:
Domestic partnership benefits on the decline in Massachusetts:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_07_02-2006_07_08.shtml#1152373916
According to [1]this article, the Boston Globe will soon require its
gay employees to get married in order to keep their same-sex partners'
health benefits:
A memo sent to the Globe's Boston Newspaper Guild members, and
obtained by the Herald, states that Massachusetts gay Guild
employees can extend their benefits to their partners only if they
marry.
"An employee who currently covers a same-sex domestic partner as a
dependent will have to marry his or her partner by Jan. 1 for the
employee benefits coverage to continue at the employee rates," the
memo states. . . .
Benefits for domestic partners were originally offered to gay
employees because they couldn't legally marry, said Ilene Robinson
Sunshine, a lawyer at Sullivan & Worcester.
Now that gay marriage is legal in Massachusetts companies that
offer benefits to gay employees' partners risk hearing cries of
discrimination from unmarried straight couples. . . .
The Globe does not extend benefits to live-in partners of its
heterosexual employees. Like many companies, it offered benefits to
partners of gay employees because marriage was not an option for
them. . . . . Paul Holtzman, an attorney specializing in employment
law at Krokidas & Bluestein, said you can expect more local
companies to change their policies.
"There is a trend towards doing what the Globe did," he said. "A
number of employers have taken the position that now that same-sex
marriage is an option there is no longer a need to offer domestic
partner benefits."
While it's hard to be cheerful about the prospect that anyone would
lose health coverage, this is on the whole a salutary development. My
view has been that an incremental approach to gay marriage --
involving first the recognition of domestic partnerships and/or civil
unions -- is ordinarily the best path. It is good policy and good
politics. Critics of this approach, including Jon Rauch (who favors
gay marriage) and Stanley Kurtz (who opposes it), have countered that
such incrementalism creates a host of alternative statuses that risk
making marriage less attractive. (Some people welcome this development
since they'd like to knock marriage off its pedestal.) Their fear is
that once a constituency develops for these alternative statuses it
will be nearly impossible to end them.
The apparent trend in Massachusetts, however, suggests that interim
marriage-lite statuses can be created for same-sex partners before gay
marriage is recognized and then ended once full marriage is achieved.
The reasons, I suspect, are both legal and political. There is first
the fear of a sex-discrimination claim if a business or government
continues to offer unmarried same-sex domestic partners benefits while
not offering the same benefits to unmarried opposite-sex domestic
partners. That discrimination could have been justified as long as gay
partners could not be married, but the legal defense will be harder
once they can be. There is second the political difficulty of
justifying the continuance of same-sex-only domestic partners benefits
once those partners have the marriage option. Heterosexual employees
(and citizens in general) will want to know why gay employees and
their unmarried partners should continue to get what will now look a
lot like "special rights" to domestic partners benefits unavailable to
anyone else.
Much harder to dislodge -- after gay marriage is permitted -- will be
domestic partners benefits and other marriage-lite statuses that,
pre-gay-marriage, were made available both to unmarried heterosexual
and unmarried homosexual partners. The equitable objections to
continuing such alternative statuses will be unavailable, since
everyone can access them.
The incrementalist conservative approach to gay marriage, therefore,
has to emphasize that interim alternative statuses (like domestic
partnerships and civil unions) should be available only to same-sex
couples who do not yet have the option to marry. Alternative statuses
can be limited to gay partners by emphasizing (1) the stronger
equitable claim of gay partners who can't marry and by emphasizing (2)
the enormously higher cost of including unmarried heterosexual
partners in such statuses (who always comprise by far the largest
share of the costs when theses statuses are available equally to
them). Same-sex only interim alternative statuses will, ironically,
have to fend off sex-discrimination and other claims. But this has so
far not been difficult to do.
References
1.
http://news.bostonherald.com/localRegional/view.bg?articleid=147383&format=text
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