Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 09:39:15 -0600 From: Cheryl Sesser I'd like to submit an editorial I wrote for the Texas Human Rights Foundation newsletter to the QRD domestic partnership section. The subject is Austin's proposition 22 which was passed last May to repeal the city's DP policy, and the role that the definition of domestic partner played in it's passage. Cheryl Sesser sesser@arlut.utexas.edu ------------------------ Last Thanksgiving was a special one for me, as I celebrated the closing of the purchase of my first house. Among my earliest memories of homeownership is a knock on the door by someone I presumed to be my neighbor--a pleasant looking elderly women with two young girls in tow. She asked if I would sign her petition, at the top of which were the words 'Domestic Partnership'. It wasn't clear to me what the petition was for, but my gaydar was whispering "not friendly", so I asked. She explained that they were trying to get the city's domestic partner policy put on the ballot for a public vote. She still hadn't said whether she and her group were in favor of the policy, so I pushed. I told her I was very much in favor of domestic partner benefits, and she finally confirmed that she was against it, but didn't I agree that it should be put to a vote of the people? I explained that I wouldn't sign her petition since we didn't agree on the issue, and when she went away, my friend and I giggled at how she had come to the wrong house. She had gotten me thinking with that last question, though. Wasn't it only fair to let taxpayers vote on where our money goes? I spent a good deal of the next few weeks thinking this over. As I pondered, I also became more and more aware that rather than whispering "not friendly", my sixth sense should have been screaming "red alert". My neighbor's petition was successful, and the ballot measure to limit benefits to the legally married spouses of Austin city employees came to be known as Proposition 22. The measure passed with national attention, but does that mean the issue of domestic partner benefits is over and done with? The most recent edition of 'A Legal Guide for Lesbian and Gay Couples' notes that "in May of 1994, Austin, Texas became the first U.S. city to repeal its domestic partner- ship law" in a section titled 'A Little Bit of History'. I, for one, am not proud of such a distinction, but the radical right will certainly be pointing to this historical event for years to come. After all, such a precedent of the legalization of discrimination is the ultimate tribute to the power of 'family values'. I first became aware of the concept of domestic partnership when I read over the internet that a prominent east coast college had implemented such a policy for it's gay and lesbian employees. They had strict guidelines on how such a partnership would be defined, from the length of time the same-sex couples had to have been living together before registration, to the time lapse between registration for consecutive partners (whom they refer to as same-sex spousal equivalents). The rules seemed to me like those I would expect to find for common-law marriage, and common-law divorce if such a thing existed. This was the first I had heard of this kind of policy, and I got very excited; someone, somewhere, was taking positive ACTION to correct the unfair discrimination of the enforcement of marriage laws. As time passed, and I became aware of similar policies being implemented in industry and government as well as academia, my excitement turned into a sort of cocky righteousness. All of these institutions were showing the legislatures that they could, and would, make right what the legal system had screwed up. The passage of Prop. 22 may have let the air out my balloon, but it did little to dampen my spirits. We simply have to try again, and keep trying until this civil rights battle is won. The conclusion I came to after asking myself why I shouldn't have signed my neighbor's petition is that votes are designed to reflect the will of the majority; it therefore must be left to our government to protect the rights of minorities. The state Supreme Court of Colorado has exhibited such power by overturning the voter-approved ammendment that outlawed anti-discrimination legislation in that state. If we keep pushing the domestic partnership issue in Texas, we will eventually strip away all of the loopholes the judges and legislators can gracefully crawl into, leaving only the bare issue of discrimination. (Yes, I know this tactic didn't work in 'To Kill a Mockingbird', but that was Alabama.) The case of the Stephen F. Austin State University brings new hope of eliminating one such loophole, the sodomy law. So where do we start? We must start with ourselves and our own employers, but how we approach the issue depends largely on where we work. In "Recognizing Lesbian and Gay Families: Strategies for Obtaining Domestic Partner Benefits", the National Center for Lesbian Rights discusses the details and the pros and cons of three specific tactics: collective bargaining, litigation, and legis- lation. The first of these methods works well in a unionized workplace. Employees must first gain the support of the union (reference: "Pride at Work: Organizing for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Unions" M. Frank and D. Holcomb, Lesbian and Gay Labor Network, 1990), and then the union can bargain for benefits on the employees' behalf. A written, sexual orientation anti- discrimination clause may provide a good basis for collective bargaining efforts. Litigation, on the other hand, is not an option either employees or employers generally care to pursue. The mere threat of a lawsuit may be all the incentive an employer needs to equalize benefits, but there is no guarentee that it won't go to court, or that the court will rule in the employee's favor. Litigation does provide an important opportunity, however, to "educate the judicial system about...the discrimination encountered by lesbians and gay men ...[which] is an essential prerequisite to eventually insuring gay and lesbian litigants equal treatment in the courts". The last tactic, legislation, is suggested when the employer is a public entity, such as a city or state. This is the approach we tried in Austin, and it backfired. There are many theories as to why, and mine is based on some observations. I work in a very diverse environment, with a few radical liberals like myself, a few extreme conservatives, and whole range of people scattered along the middle-of-the-road. I spoke with many of my coworkers throughout the Prop. 22 campaign. There were some people whose views were not open to challenge; often these were people who feel that their religious beliefs should be imposed upon everyone. Other times they were people like me ;-). But the ones who caught my attention were those who may have seen the denial of benefits to same-sex couples as wrong, especially when these couples would be married if they could. Unfortunately, many of the people who might have voted against discrimination, voted in favor of Prop. 22 because they didn't want to the city to provide what they saw as a shack-up policy, extend- ing benefits to heterosexual couples who were too 'irresponsible' to get married. This isn't an argument I care to mess with. Indeed, I'd rather avoid it altogether because it is a successful distraction from the issues of gay rights and minority discrimination. This is why I beleive that future DP initiatives in Texas should attempt to obtain benefits only for same-sex spousal equivalents. Are there any precedents or statistics to support my theory and opinion? "A National Profile of Domestic Partner Benefits" (Dr. Marjorie Cowmeadow, Univer- sity of Minnesota 2/23/94), as well as the NCLR, lists numerous institutions which extend DP benefits to gay and lesbian employees only. The reasoning is generally some version of "same-sex couples are prohibited by law from marrying each other, while heterosexual couples have the option of marriage". According to the NCRL, however, "the majority of individuals and groups involved in the attempt to extend benefit coverage...have concluded that coverage should extend to both same-sex and unmarried opposite-sex couples". But why is that? The NCRL suggests that although "the effort to achieve employment benefit coverage was instigated in the lesbian and gay community", including unmarried hetero- sexual couples as domestic partners makes such initiatives more "palatable" to the general public. In the case of Levi Strauss, they "deliberately chose to emphasize the benefits as equalizing compensation without regard to marital status to avoid the issue of homosexuality in the press". So gay rights is bad press, but gay rights is what it is. Levi Strauss knows that. The Reverend Charles Bullock knows that. Why then don't my coworkers know that? A longtime friend in Massachusetts tells me that pursuing domestic partner benefits as a matter of marital-status discrimination, rather than sexual- orientation discrimination, worked well in the "land of leaping liberals". But we're in the Bible belt now, and it didn't work here. I don't know whether my coworkers would have voted against Prop. 22 if domestic partners meant only same-sex spousal equivalents, or even if their support would have been enough. But we would at least be in a position to appeal to a sense of minority rights of both the people and the courts. I greatly admire the work of those Austin- ites who succeeded in persuading the city to extend benefits to unmarried couples. It's time to learn from the experience, and move forward with it. Finally, the stuffing I want in my Thanksgiving turkey this year is to be able to bypass all of this domestic partnership nonsense completely. People who vote in favor of anti-gay laws too often claim to do so because their Bible or their church tells them that homosexuality is immoral. By insisting that sex- uality is a religious issue, the religious right seems to me to be implying that we should pursue gay rights as a matter of religious freedom. After all, marriage is a spiritual union, and MY God doesn't discriminate against adults in love. Aloha, Cheryl Helene Sesser "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."