Subject: Newsweek DP article
From: [email-masked] (Kevin Osinski)
To: [email-masked]
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Mar 92 09:42:10 -0800

Hey, maybe I'll be the first one to post this!  Here is an article in
the latest Newsweek magazine, which hit the stands yesterday, on
domestic partnerships.  A previous poster mentioned this article;  I
ran out and bought the magazine and typed in the text for you all.

On the cover of the magazine, above the "Newsweek" banner, appears the
following:

                           WHAT'S A COUPLE?
                   The New Rules of Family Benefits

Regards,

Kevin

                          DOMESTICATED BLISS
 New laws are making it official for gay or live-in straight couples

   -- Copied without permission from Newsweek Magazine, 3/23/92 --

Lee Ryan and Robin Leonard have lived together for eight years.  Last
July they went to city hall in San Francisco and made it legal.  While
a friend took photographs, Ryan hummed wedding marches in Leonard's
ear.  It was, says Leonard, 31, a lawyer and editor at Nolo Press, "a
wonderful emotional experience."  At work, colleagues hung up
streamers and put a "Just Domesticated" sign over the door.  Leonard
and Ryan, a 33-year-old law librarian, are lesbians, and the license
they picked up at city hall certifies them as "domestic partners."
Christine Farren, 37, and David Ferland, 33, live in Waterbury, Vt.
The town doesn't recognize domestic partnerships, but Ben and Jerry's
Homemade, Inc., where Farren is an administrative assistant, does.
Since 1989, the ice-cream company has offered unmarried couples the
same benefits, including health insurance, that married employees
receive.  Ferland, manager of a small hotel with no group-health plan,
is now covered through Farren.  Without the policy, he says, "if I
broke my leg, I'd be financially devastated.  THis could be a
life-saver for me, literally."

Domestic partnership was unheard of a decade ago.  In the last few
years, a handful of corporations and a dozen local governments,
including Seattle and Tacoma Park, Md., have set up DP plans.  Despite
significant opposition, largely from conservatives and religious
groups, they may soon be commonplace.  The number of Americans living
together outside marriage has increased more than 400 percent since
1970.  Almost 3 million of the country's 93 million households now
consist of unmarried couples.  At the same time, the number of
"traditional" families -- two married parents with children -- has
declined steadily, if not dramatically.  With changing sexual mores,
soaring numbers of single parents and an economy driving more people
to share households, the definition of "family" is increasingly fuzzy.
"The 'Leave It to Beaver' family is not the norm," says Steve Culver,
editor and publisher of The Michigan Tribune, a gay/lesbian newspaper.
"We'll be seeing a lot more different types of families in the next 10
years."

Though domestic partnership is defined in a number of ways, at present
it is almost exclusively limited to cohabitants who have a stable,
intimate relationship and are financially interdependent.  Two weeks
ago, however, the Washington, D.C., city council unanimously passed an
ordinance that covers virtually anyone living together, including
siblings or platonic friends.  (The measure will not go into effect,
however, unless Congress approves it, which is unlikely.)  Domestic
partnership is often perceived as a gay issue.  But Mary Bonauto,
staff attorney for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD),
claims that "the vast majority of people using domestic-partnership
laws are straight."  About 70 percent of Seattle's city employees who
are taking advantage of DP benefits are heterosexual;  in Berkeley,
Calif., the figure is 84 percent.  Some homosexuals may not register
because they don't want to make public their sexual orientation.
Enrollment has been low across the board, largely because employees'
partners usually work and have health-care plans.

Domestic partnership not only has a number of definitions, but varying
benefits, some of which are abstract.  Several cities give residents
the opportunity to register as DPs, yet they get nothing out of it but
a title.  People sign up for emotional or political reasons.  Dale
Petty, 40, a biomedical engineer and part-time musician, lives in Ann
Arbor, Mich., with Janine Palms, a 44-year-old day-car provider, and
her daughter, Choi, 16.  Registering, says Palms, was "a public
statement of support for alternative families.  Down the road,
hopefully, [the ordinance] will lead to financial and legal benefits."
About 1,100 San Francisco couples, including Judith Stevenson, 48, and
Lily Gee Hickman, 38, have registered since February 1991.  "It's
important to have a legitimate title, to go through the ritual of
getting blessings of the state," says Stevenson.  "It's simply a first
step in breaking ground for all kinds of new definitions of family."

Companies that institute a DP plan are not acting entirely out of
altruism or fair play.  Some do it only after employees put pressure
on them;  some believe it will make them more competitive.  Low- or
no-cost items, such as sick leave and bereavement leave, are usually
extended first, but can be as important as the pricier ones.
Washington's proposed plan, for instance, would require hospitals to
allow domestic partners to visit their ailing partners.  Big-ticket
items, such as medical and dental coverage or relocation costs,
usually come later, if at all.  Many employers have difficulty
finding an insurance company that will carry a DP health-care plan,
largely because of the potentially high cost of covering people with
the AIDS virus.  (So far, however, employers who do have medical plans
report only a tiny increase in rates.)  Occasionally, a DP plan has an
unusual benefit.  The city of Ithaca, N.Y., gives its employees and
their domestic partners husband-and-wife rates at the city golf
course. 

'Discrimination issue':

Last month Levi Strauss, with 23,000 employees nationwide, became the
largest company yet to enter the DP market.  "This is really a
discrimination issue," says Donna Goya, senior vice president of human
resources.  "We realize that family structures are changing and want
to respec this diversity."  Lotus Development Corp., a major software
company, recently put in place a homosexuals-only DP plan.
Management's reasoning, says Polly Laurelchild, one of the gay Lotus
employees who helped develop the DP policy, was that heterosexual
employees can marry -- and thus get family benefits -- but homosexuals
cannot. 

Not everyone endorses, or even condones, domestic partnerships.  When
the city council in Ann Arbor, Mich., debated an ordinance, opponents
at a packed city hall meeting read from their Bibles.  After it passed
last year, Ellen and Charles Graham filed suit against the city.  They
claimed that the DP ordinance would lead to higher taxes and objected
to its message.  "[It] really implies a sexual relationship among
unmarried couples," says Ellen Graham.  "What do you do when children
are involved?"  Last month a judge dismissed the case.

There are also suits on the other side.  In 1988, three New York City
teachers, all of whom have same-sex partners, sued the Board of
Education for DP benefits.  They charged that the board, by not
granting them the same benefits as married couples, discriminated
on the basis of sexual orientation.  Last August the court ruled in
their favor;  the city is appealing and has brought up cost as an
issue.  But, says the teachers' attorney, Paula Ettelbrick, acting
executive director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund,
"cost is never an excuse for discrimination."  Almost three quarters
of the respondents to a recent Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co.
survey thought of a family as "a group of people who love and care for
each other," not as one "related by blood, marriage or adoption."  For
domestic partnerships, changing times, if not the courts, may
ultimately rule.

Katrine Ames with Christopher Sulavik in Ann Arbor, Nadine Joseph in
San Francisco, Lucille Beachy in New York and Todd Park in Boston.

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Kevin Osinski                                  Member of Consulting Staff
[email-masked]                                   System Software Group
(408) 944-7944                                     Cadence Design Systems

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