Dec 17, 2004  |  By: MARSHALL MILLE and DORIAN SOLOT | COMMENTS     

IT’S ONE THING to have the freedom to marry. It’s another to be forced to marry.

In his editorial last week, “Taking the blame for messing up marriage,” Chris Crain argued that domestic partner benefits should be limited to same-sex couples, and then yanked away when those couples are granted the right to marry.

To the contrary, the approach he suggests is not a way to strengthen the institution of marriage, nor does it help the very real families, gay and straight, that exist today.

A fair-minded approach to these issues is based on fundamental respect for personal choices. While same-sex couples should be able to choose whether to legally marry, marriage should never be the only way of ensuring basic rights and protections.

Even after same-sex couples can get married in every state in the union, families will continue to come in many shapes and sizes, both married and unmarried. Domestic partner benefits are one way in which employers recognize this growing diversity of their workforce.

Arguing that DP benefits are merely “interim measures” that can “be dissolved” once marriage is available perpetuates the same system of exclusion that the LGBT community has long condemned.

LET’S IMAGINE IT’S 2014, a decade into the future. A lesbian couple, Jean and Susan, have been together for 25 years and raised three kids together. They never got around to getting married, though.

Maybe Jean didn’t want to get a marriage license because years ago she’d been in a bad marriage to a man, and never wanted to be anyone’s wife again. Or maybe Susan believes strongly that the state shouldn’t be in the marriage business.

After 25 years together, Jean is in a serious car accident and in intensive care. If the hospital barred Susan from her side because they weren’t married, would gay people say, “Serves them right — if they want the benefits of marriage, they should have gotten married”?

Of course not. We’d say Jean and Susan’s lives show they are family, whether they have a marriage license, and hospital visitation privileges need not be based on marital status.

And that’s the point. If marriage isn’t an adequate litmus test for “family” when it comes to hospital visitation, what makes us think it’s adequate in the realm of employment benefits or anywhere else? Marriage is one way to recognize who is family, but when it’s upheld as the only way, real families are endangered.

LUCKILY, SAVVY EMPLOYERS understand the value of offering domestic partner benefits policies, and making them inclusive of both same-sex and different-sex couples.

There are now well over 7,300 employers around the country offering DP benefits. Of these, a whopping 92 percent make their benefits available to both same-sex and different-sex couples.

This vast majority don’t stipulate that, “If you can marry, you must marry” to qualify for health benefits, whether you’re heterosexual or LGBT.

These facts stand in serious opposition to Crain’s suggestion that different-sex couples were included in these policies merely because “well-meaning progressives” and “left-leaning” gay activists were trying to be nice.

The earliest and best argument in favor of domestic partner benefits is to provide equal pay for equal work, recognizing the increasing family diversity within the workplace.

As the fight for marriage continues to gain ground, let’s not follow the same tactics of anti-gay forces and begin denying couples rights and benefits they already have.

It’s not an employer’s role to deny equal pay for equal work to an employee who still cannot or chooses not to marry for personal, political, philosophical or financial reasons.

Forcing people to marry because they need health care does not strengthen the institution of marriage.