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Charlotte is Wrong to Deny Benefits to Employees' Same-Sex Partners

An interesting op-ed piece that ran in the Charlotte Observer recently and distributed by the Mecklenburg Gay and Lesbian Political Action Committee (http://www.meckpac.org/).

City wrong to deny benefits to employees' same-sex partners
This decision ought to be about what's right, not what saves money
DAVID H. JONES
Special to the Observer

Remember when you were in elementary school and the new kid showed up? Puny, thick glasses, bad haircut, old clothes, last year's lunch box. Remember how funny it was, watching from the safety of the
crowd, as the schoolyard bully extorted his milk money? Remember how disgusted you were with yourself on the bus ride home as you realized that you were a coward? You had failed to do what your father had always told you to do -- step out of the crowd and call to the bully, "Hey! You! Pick on someone your own size."

That feeling came back as I read a report in the Observer a few weeks ago. The article reported on a memorandum from the city manager and the city's human resources director to City Council recommending that the city not provide benefits to the same-sex partners of city employees. The memorandum noted that while the city might be legally forced to do this someday, it is not obligated to do so now. The memorandum cited a survey done of city employees indicating that these benefits were not a priority. According to the report, this decision saves the city between $94,000 and $500,000 a year, A senior elected official applauded the recommendation, saying that there was no public policy reason for doing this.

Is this decision really about the money? Who wouldn't want the city to save $500,000 if it could? However, $500,000 is only 0.07 percent of the total city operating budget for fiscal 2004 of over $736 million. Not much of a savings for a public policy so unfair. If we are denying these benefits to save the money, then like Esau of the Old Testament, we are selling our birthright for a bowl of stew and piece of bread.

If all of the city's employees were married heterosexuals, the city would find the money to pay the benefit for all or cut back the benefit for all. The city would not decide to provide the benefit to everyone except employees married to someone of another race, or married to a divorcee, or married to a southpaw. Silly examples, you say. When our great-grandparents were young, people thought you could "cure" left-handedness. Two generations ago, divorcees were shunned as moral failures. During my lifetime some preachers stood in their pulpits and told congregations that interracial marriage was unholy. See any similarities now?

Of course providing dependant benefits to same-sex couples is a low priority among city employees; most of them aren't gay. As a lawyer, I hear lawyers criticized because they use legal loopholes to avoid doing what is right. Is it right not to provide these benefits because there is no current legal requirement? The memorandum seems to say so. If there is no public policy for treating gays fairly, as implied by the quoted official, then there ought to be.

I realize that conservative political and religious leaders have told happily married fathers, like me, to fear gays (and it seems that gay couples who are willing to make a lifetime commitment to each other in front of God and witnesses are the most frightening) because of the threat they pose to my marriage and family. I try to imagine armed bands of gays and lesbians battering down my front door in the dead of night, like TV policemen rousting the bad guys, tumbling into our front hall holding out AK-47s and demanding that my wife divorce me because I am insensitive and a poor listener, and undermining our parental discipline by telling our boys that it is OK to use drugs, or jump on the sofa, or leave the back door wide open so all the bugs can come in and we can air-condition the entire neighborhood. I try, but it just doesn't scare me.

The decision not to pay these benefits is small and mean and unbecoming of a city which usually is governed with a generous heart. Even if this policy is applied to all unmarried couples, be they gay or straight, it is still more unfair to gays. Leaving aside, for now, whether it's right for the city to favor married
employees over those who live together without marriage, gay people suffer more. Unmarried heterosexuals can always marry. The state will not stand in their way. The day when gay people are legally allowed to wed here is a long way off. It is doubly cruel to deny gays the right to marry and then deny them benefits because they're not.

So today, I try to find that courage, which so often failed me in the schoolyard, and call out to our city leaders, "Hey! You! Pick on someone your own size."

David H. Jones

Observer community columnist David H. Jones, a Charlotte lawyer, serves on the board of the Mecklenburg Council on Homelessness Inc. and the Belmont Community Development Corp. Write him c/o The Observer, P.O. Box 30308, Charlotte, NC 28230-0308.