Benefits banned

Although Penny Gardner has been with her partner for 11 years, they still don’t depend on each other when it comes to their health. As a visiting professor in Women, Gender and Social Justice, Gardner isn’t enrolled for health benefits due to her fixed term on campus. But a Michigan Supreme Court ruling has made benefits inaccessible by prohibiting public universities from offering them to partners of gay employees.

“If we were married, we wouldn’t have to jump through all of the hoops,” she said.

Because Gardner and her partner don’t have joint finances, they are ineligible under MSU’s revised health benefits plan.

Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling states that the 2004 ban on gay marriage also prevents state universities from offering health coverage for partners of gay workers.

“It’s deeply disturbing and disappointing, in a broader context of the many ways the campus commitment to rights has been challenged by state legislation,” said Brent Bilodeau, director of the Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transgender Resource Center.

“What’s most disturbing about the value it shows of LBGT families. It gives the signal that LBGT families are not supported in this state.”

As of October 2007, the university had 54 employees who had a partner enrolled for benefits. Comparatively, there are 7,471 married spouses who are enrolled for benefits.

The university began offering health benefits to same-sex partners of MSU employees in 1997.

In 2004, state voters approved an amendment to the constitution that defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, banning gay marriage in state.

After the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled the current plan unconstitutional, the university shifted its health benefits policy in July 2007, to a program that does not specifically cover domestic partners.

The new program made benefits available to Other Eligible Individuals that met certain criteria, including joint residency and finances.

Those changes make the recent ruling largely irrelevant to MSU’s benefits plan, said Grant Littke, president of MSU’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Faculty, Staff and Graduate Student Association.

Gardner said the benefits offered by the university are good, but not enough.

“It’s an OK plan,” Gardner said. “But it’s still not the same as having the same rights as married individuals do.”

Gary Glenn, president of the American Family Association, or AFA, of Michigan, said the law banning gay marriage never intended to leave anybody without insurance benefits.

“Most people get the impression somebody lost something,” he said. “Nobody did.”

In fact, with the rewritten policies now covering other eligible individuals and not solely domestic partners, more people are covered now than before, Glenn said.

“Not a single individual has lost benefits,” he said. “The only thing that has changed is the name.”

Glenn said the AFA actually supported an even more ambitious plan in Ann Arbor that would make the other eligible individual any person the employee wished, though the plan didn’t pass.

“We felt that was in line with the language of the amendment. MSU just narrowed it down,” Glenn said.

Even as the Supreme Court ruling was somewhat expected and many in the LBGT community had planned for it, the message the state is sending about the LBGT community is terrible, Gardner said.

“We can’t even get sexual or gender identity listed in the state civil rights laws,” she said.

“We are not welcome in the state, nor are we protected.”

If the state is trying to experience growth, Gardner said, it shouldn’t be closing its doors to a whole class of people.

“We are shooting ourselves in the foot,” she said.

Published on Sunday, May 11, 2008