"Domestic Partner" Rip-off - NO!

Joel Pett, award-winning editorial cartoonist of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., is now offering a short vocal commentary each week on the paper’s Web site. The one introduced in the first week of the New Year comprised a bit of sarcasm relating to “domestic-partner” benefits, a subject being considered by the University of Kentucky governing board. The paper’s position is that such benefits should be enacted.

According to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, a domestic partner is “either one of an unmarried heterosexual or homosexual cohabiting couple especially when considered as to eligibility for spousal benefits.” So, for university purposes, the domestic-partner issue has to do with cadging currently unauthorized perks from a citizen-owned institution the things legally authorized and officially documented only for spouses and families, principally those contingent upon the marriage contract.

On 02 November 2004, Amendment 233A was overwhelmingly approved by Kentucky voters and made a part of the Kentucky Constitution: “Only a marriage between one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Kentucky. A legal status identical or substantially similar to that of marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized.” In Kentucky, homosexuals may not legally be married to each other, thus the “partners” are not accorded standing accruing to spouses for consideration(s) provided by the state or institutions regulated or supported by it.

It would appear that no benefits are available for any individual not legally married to an eligible recipient, or a dependent not having family standing, as in the case of children in either homosexual households or heterosexual shack-ups. The law – actually carrying the weight of the Constitution – seems quite clear. Even if the institutions are self-insured and employees usually pay part of their health-insurance premiums, the state has the power to regulate them, and, of course, pours tens of millions of taxpayer/voter dollars into their support. The citizens have spoken in a landslide vote and this subject should be moot, since the regulation is already in place and it would seem that the university, as a Kentucky agency, has no power to change it. Private institutions can do as they please, and a couple of Kentucky colleges do the domestic-partner thing, as do some industries in Kentucky.

Outgoing Lexington, Ky., Mayor Teresa Isaac tried to impose the domestic-partner benefit on the taxpayers by executive order in 2003, but was turned back immediately by the governing Council. Her bizarre action was perpetrated by the claim of a homosexual city employee that his male partner (lover, whatever) should be entitled to the benefits of a wife. The partner was neither infirm nor unable to work and pay his own way…and certainly could never be a wife. All that notwithstanding, according to the law, he would not have been eligible for taxpayer benefits, anyway.

Perhaps the most egregious reason given for the domestic-partner perk (not counting the overarching one of political correctness) is that its inculcation is necessary to bring UK into research-university top-20 land; in other words, the brightest and the best brains are so overwhelmingly owned by homosexuals or those unwilling to make a marriage commitment that they must be cajoled and pampered into blessing the university with their superior abilities. What hogwash! This is a slap in the face of all those who manage to reach top-echelon status without the “advantage” of engaging in perverted behavior, whether homosexual or heterosexual.

The relentless drive toward political correctness, defined as anything anyone says it is and therefore susceptible to everything from the merely weird to the utterly gross, is the damnation of the so-called postmodern society. The glorification of perversion in all of its deviant sexual behaviors as well as the recognition of fornication as the mark of ultra-sophistication essentially defines current political correctness. It is a cancer upon the society. This effort represents a raid upon the public treasury, nothing more and nothing less. Indeed, a whole new bureaucracy would be needed just to determine at any given time whose partner is whose partner, there being no legal documents to make an accounting.

This is a no-brainer, and the university should not burden the public with even a discussion of the matter.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark