New York State recently legalized gay marriage. Prior to this legalization, our university was very proactive about recognizing same sex couples, particularly when it came to employee benefits. Indeed, if you were a U of R employee your same-sex partner was eligible to receive health insurance coverage under your plan (as well as children).
However, now that same-sex marriages have been legalized in New York, the U of R has now been forced to drop this option for couples. In an attempt to create a situation where traditional couples and same sex couples were treated equally, the U of R now only extends health and other benefits to partners that are married. What this means of course is that same-sex couples who had not married, nor ever intended to marry, find themselves in a worse position today than before the marriage legislation was passed.
I am sure that was not the intention of the advocates of the law.
My company Raytheon did the same thing in Mass when it was legalized up there. Teh Gays were not amused. (I was)
I thought that would slow the agenda, but it didn’t. When polyandry is legalized it will be the end of spouses being able to get on your insurance. How can they limit it to one?
So prior to the legalization of same gender marriage in New York, a fellow could move in with a male U of R employee and get health benefits? How many nights a week were they required to be in the same house? Seems like it might be a little intrusive to verify conjugal relations between them to set up the insurance coverage.
Perhaps the issue here is not marriage, or lifestyle, but one of employee benefits. Eliminate the tax deductibillity of benefits and the issue goes away, because the benefits would go away, and we would get wages instead, and simply buy what we want to buy. Why should my employer provide my health care, or life insurance, disability insurance, etc.? They don’t provide my housing, or buy my food or anything else.
Coal mines traditionally provided housing, as did other firms of the early industrial era. In the go-go years, company apartments in the city were available to top managers who lived in the suburbs. Moving now from Ann Arbor to Austin, I find a check box in some forms wanting to know if this will be a “corporate lease.” So, your employer could provide you with healthcare, a car, or membership at a billiards hall: whatever you negotiate.
That is a deeper consideration. The unquestioned assumption is that all workers must be paid the same – in the same forms of money and total compensation and reimbursement. That thinking denies individual responses to individual circumstances.
The Federal government has long subsidized married couples. Why? I understand the social engineering that assumes and accepts the family as the cornerstone of society. But that is not very deep thinking. A household ought to be able to take depreciations on their dishwashers and lawnmowers as capital tools. That is a more salient problem than who gets to be Dad when we play house.
Karl Marx condemned capitalism for destroying the family by letting women work for wages. (Isaac Asimov called the typewriter the greatest tool for women’s liberation in the industrial era.) Then, in the generation following Marx, so-called “Marxists” excoriated Max Weber for being a “conservative” who studied only Church, State, and Family. They failed to provide sociological studies of the firm – though they continued their ideological condemnations of businesses. In our generation neo-Marxists Arlie Hochschilld and Barbara Ehrenreich have come no further to understanding the dynamics of enterprise in the information age.
Perhaps we need to be informed by science fiction works such as Shockwave Rider and Neuromancer to understand the evolution of home life and family.