|
|
The following outlines some of the most important arguments used to support domestic partnership policies. Make sure you talk to others who've recently worked on similar policies, and take the time to develop your arguments.
There are three major arguments for domestic partnership policies, which closely parallel the goals of domestic partnership. They are arguments for equal treatment, for relationship recognition in crisis, and for relationship acknowledgment generally. However, the goal which is most important to you shouldn't necessarily dictate which argument you use. Your resources and your audience should.
These arguments also somewhat parallel the different kinds of domestic partnership policies. Equal treatment policies, for example, seem to fit best with benefit systems, crisis recognition with recognition systems, and acknowledgment generally with registration systems.
Hence, the arguments parallel the three policies, each of the arguments working more or less with the other policies, so your policy choice doesn't necessarily dictate your decision about the main argument. Moreover, if you propose a policy which combines two or all three types of domestic partnership policies, you'll have to decide which argument to emphasize.
This is the argument: many government, work place and business policies depend on marriage to determine important things like eligibility. This is unfair to unmarried couples. It is particularly unfair to LGBT relationships, since same-sex couples aren't allowed to marry.
This argument works best with employment benefit plans. Since benefits are an important part of a person's pay (estimates vary from a third to 40% of the value of total compensation), the argument goes, giving the same benefits to employees with spouses and not to those with unmarried partners is simply not equal pay for equal work. Outside the work place, this argument not only carries less force, it is sometimes successfully exploited by the opposition.
Most of the opposition focuses on the fact that implicit in the argument is the position that unmarried couples are "equal to" married couples. Opponents of domestic partnership generally don't accept that, and a surprising number of moderates who are otherwise willing to recognize that nonmarital relationships are important, don't accept it either.
Actually, the argument only implicitly claims equality in terms of entitlement to the specific benefit or recognition; it says married and unmarried couples are "equal" in the sense that both should, for example, be on the list of people who can visit in intensive care units. But that's a bit of logic parsing that may be too subtle for many campaigns. The argument tends to work better in the work place because there it focuses not so much on the couple as it does on the employee member; it is the employee who is not getting equal pay.
If instead of a benefit plan you propose a recognition or registration system, either consider one of the other fairness arguments, both of which don't emphasize equivalence, or be ready to meet the equality argument head on. You may be able to do this best with examples of deeply committed relationships which have received shabby treatment at the hands of some institution. See 4.1 Proving the Case: Personal Stories.
This argument focuses on how unfair and cruel society's failure to recognize unmarried couples can be. Society uses marriage and blood, the argument goes, to decide who a person's family is. Since nonmarital couples don't, and same-sex couples can't, come within those definitions of family, we are often separated from our most intimate family members when we need them most.
To be made convincingly, this argument needs two things. First, it needs illustrations of the problem. Good stories which illustrate just how devastating nonrecognition can be are very powerful. Second, the argument needs to be tied to your proposal. If your proposal has a recognition system (like a bereavement leave policy for an employer, or city requirement of hospital visitation), the easiest way to do that is by presenting stories which would have come out differently had your policy been in place. But you can also use this argument with registrations systems.
Registration systems, and to a lesser extent, recognition systems and benefit plans, all amount to some form of acknowledgment that nonmarital relationships are important. This argument simply says they are important and deserve the minimal respect those systems give them. Similar to the previous argument, this one can also be powerfully supported by stories which illustrate the mean consequences of not acknowledging nonmarital relationships. It can also be helped by proof about how widespread nonmarital relationships are.
However, this argument can and does draw the same opposition the equality argument draws; that is, it suggests equality with marriage. But the very modest or, in the case of pure registration, nonexistent practical consequences of domestic partnership make this easier to deflect, since equality isn't part of the argument.
Acknowledgment and recognition arguments are occasionally recast, especially in light of AIDS, as arguments that society should give same-sex relationships all the help it can. This version of those arguments makes some sense when it is used with illustrations of the harsh consequences visited on people taking care of partners who are seriously ill because their relationships are undefined. It needs to be handled with care because occasionally it becomes an argument that we should pass domestic partnership laws to encourage exclusive relationships. This of course makes a value judgment about coupling you may not want to make; worse, it almost invites reliance on old stereotypes about commitment being particularly difficult for LGBT people.
All three arguments have a strain which points out that because same-sex couples can't marry, they are hurt more by society's failure to recognize nonmarital relationships. This sometimes becomes a justification for limiting a policy to LGBT people. Occasionally, it becomes an argument in itself; that is, that LGBT relationships ought to be recognized because same-sex couples cannot marry their partners.
This argument is problematic because it invites all the "equality" opposition described above, and, since it smacks of an attack on the limitation of marriage to heterosexuals, it often intensifies that opposition. At the same time, this argument jettisons two significant groups of supporters; unmarried heterosexual couples, and others, often feminists, who think alternative models for intimate relationships are legitimate and deserve recognition.
>> Next: 4. Proving the Case
|
|
