|
|
This chapter is designed to help you decide which kind of domestic partnership policy to adopt. The goals you want to achieve with a domestic partnership plan, and the systems you want to change, will have a profound influence of the terms of your proposal. This chapter explains some of the ways in which specific goals, and the desire to change specific systems, shape domestic partnership proposals.
Most domestic partnership policies are adopted with one or more of three goals in mind. While the goals themselves aren't contradictory, any one tends to have requirements which may make a policy serve one of the other goals less well. As you think about which kind of policy you want, you need to sort through your goals and decide, when they pull in different directions, which are most important.
One goal is equal treatment. The idea is that couples who are not married deserve the same treatment as those who are. Domestic partnership can be a way to equalize treatment.
A second goal is relationship finding. We have many systems designed to locate the person who is closest to another person when the second person can't tell us. These include everything from lists of who gets property if a person dies without a will through lists of who gets to visit in hospitals and jails. Domestic partnership can be a way to find the most important person for people in relationships who can't or don't choose to marry.
A third goal is visibility for LGBT relationships. LGBT relationships are less visible than heterosexual relationships, the argument goes, because society only notices marital relationships, and in most places, same-sex couples can't marry each other. Since the invisibility reinforces stereotypes about lgbt people, visibility is a good thing for its own sake.
If a health benefit or a "free ride" pension benefit for domestic partners is an important part of your plan, your proposal will have to have a detailed definition of domestic partnership. (A "free ride" pension benefit continues to pay at least part of a pension to the spouse of the person who earned the pension after he or she dies. It is a "free ride" because the payments to the person who earned the pension are not reduced to compensate for the continuing payments to the spouse which other employees don't get.) Those benefits need a relationship that can be objectively verified apart from what people say. So proposals that include health and "free ride" pension benefits usually have definitions of domestic partnership with significant requirements and obligations.
Heath and free ride pension benefits don't necessarily require a definition similar to the definition of marriage. But to the extent that equality is an important goal of your proposal, it will push you toward a very "marriagelike" definition of domestic partnership. When your case is that domestic partners should get treatment equal to that given married couples, people are apt to insist that the domestic partnership resemble marriage as much as possible.
In some places, this has lead to definitions that closely follow a state's legal definition of marriage. In others, it has lead to definitions which require some or all of the things which married people often do, even though they are not things which are legally required. For example, some definitions require pooled finances, as shown by things like joint checking accounts, even though most states allow married people to keep finances separate if they want to.
If equality is central to your arguments, it will lead you to a "marriagelike" definition even if health and "free ride" pension benefits are not part of your plan.
The goal of relationship finding tends to pull proposals away from high definition and "marriage like" definitions. If you want a system to locate a person's closest relationships, especially in times of crisis, definitions and requirements shouldn't be so important. As much as you can, you want to let people decide for themselves who they are closest to.
Relationship finding tends to recommend policies in which people just designate others in advance as domestic partners or closest relations, with little or no definition of what the terms mean. So, for example, a bereavement leave plan might require employees to simply tell the personnel office who their "domestic partners" are if they are unmarried, or even require all employees to just name the five or ten people closest to them.
Simple designation tends to work best with recognition systems. They don't have the financial consequences of benefit systems which require high definition.
The goal of making LGBT relationships more visible leads people to emphasize proposals with registration systems, since they involve official recognition of the relationship. Visibility tends to make proposals focus on couples and some definition, because designation proposals, especially the loosest, don't really make relationships very visible. On the other hand, visibility tends to pull away from the most "marriage like" definitions since many LGBT relationships don't take on all the typical aspects of a heterosexual marriage.
It is possible to design proposals which accommodate all three goals and which work for all three types of policies. See Model B - Basic Benefits or Recognition Systems. [Link to Model B - Basic Benefits or Recognition Systems.] But these proposals typically involve some compromises on all three goals, and some limitations on the system.
If you include Health and "free ride" pension benefits for domestic partners, they are likely to become the most important part of your plan. Aside from the way they will shape your proposal by dictating a very defined relationship, they are the most expensive things you can do.
Because they are expensive, health and free ride proposals generate the toughest opposition. They often make opponents of moderates who don't have a problem with the idea of domestic partnership but who are worried about cost and profits.
They also lend themselves to "same-sex" only compromises as a way to control costs. The rational is that LGBT couples only should get the benefit because unlike heterosexual couples, they cannot get married. This of course is likely to make the proposal more "marriage like."
If you want to propose a comprehensive domestic partnership plan with some type of health benefit, and you think cost could be a serious issue, think about splitting the proposal.
In one sense, expense shouldn't be an issue. Same-sex couples are no more expensive to cover than heterosexuals, so coverage seems only fair. On the other hand, extending coverage to domestic partners simply increases the unfairness of giving financially valuable benefits to employees in couples which are not given to single employees.
One answer to this fairness point and the cost problem is to advocate "cafeteria" benefit plans and pension continuations with adjustments and no free rides. In a cafeteria plan, the employer offers to spend the same amount on benefits for each employee, and the employee chooses which benefits to take, paying for selections that go over the employer's amount. Adjusted pension continuations allow you to continue your pension, reducing the payments to you by the amount needed to keep it going for the other person after you die. With either or these approaches, a domestic partnership proposal would simply advocate putting domestic partners on the list of people from whom you can designate health coverage or a pension continuation.
The difficulty is that these proposals reduce the amount of benefits which are going to the people who get the most under the current system. For example, with health benefits, if the employer spends the same total amount on benefits, employees with big families, who are getting much more than single employees now, will get less. Both proposals are likely to draw very tough opposition from those who are getting the most from free rides and generous family\spouse health plans. Some of these opponents, often unions, will be allies if you move to extend the existing plans instead.
Finally, relationship based health plans and pension free rides are dinosaurs. The rationale for spousal health and free ride pension benefits has disappeared now that both partners in most couples work. If the federal government or your state adopts a universal coverage health plan, the spousal health benefit will be mostly meaningless. How hard are you willing to fight to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic?
A good way to begin deciding what kind of a policy you want to propose is to survey your institution; find out all the ways in which the city, employer, business or university uses or recognizes intimate relationships. Decide which things present problems you want to tackle and which kind of proposal or which combination of proposals best responds to the problems you are interested in.
If you decide to urge one of the three types of proposal instead of a combination of two or more, think about keeping your proposal adaptable. For example, if you decide to propose a pure registration system, think about whether you want to make it useable by employers, hospitals etc, for recognition and/or benefits systems.
If you are proposing either benefits or recognition systems, think about whether to make them voluntary or mandatory. Some institutions, like hospitals, typically don't oppose mandatory recognition systems for things like visitation. Other types of institutions, like businesses, often adamantly oppose any type of mandatory recognition. Given the limited number of things you can require, it may be better to set up a registration system and then organize a campaign to get people to push business and institutions to use it. This would be particularly true if you could pick up business support for a voluntary system.
>> Next: 3. Making the Case
|
|
