L.A. School Board to Weigh Benefits for Live-In Partners

The friction between Los Angeles’ first openly gay school board president and his conservative critics is headed for a flare-up this afternoon when the Los Angeles Unified School District ponders extending insurance benefits to domestic partners.

Some school board members have already expressed doubts about the $3.7-million annual cost of providing live-in partners--both heterosexual and homosexual--with insurance, including health, dental and vision coverage. But that is not the primary concern of the perennial critics of board President Jeff Horton.

They were just warming up last week, during a brief public hearing on the topic. One gave his oft-repeated speech about “sodomites,” which he tends to aim directly at Horton. Another shouted that the district has already funded too many “homosexual programs,” and a third said schools have a responsibility to “uphold the honor of marriage.”

For his part, Horton described the insurance proposal as “long overdue,” pointing out that Los Angeles city and county have approved similar measures.

Countering those who sought to characterize homosexual relationships as less than committed, Horton said at the board meeting that he has been involved with his partner for 14 years. They recently adopted a son together.

“I resent the implication that there is anything frivolous about it,” he said.

Similar controversies have erupted throughout the state as dozens of cities, school districts and private companies have considered liberalizing health benefits.

Southern Baptists vowed to boycott Disneyland after Walt Disney Co. took the plunge. In Long Beach last June, the notion of granting hospital and jail visitation rights to live-in partners unleashed a vehement debate, joined in by a councilman who detailed homosexual acts and then declared that “homosexuality fails the moral test.”

Nonetheless, insuring domestic partners has become commonplace in many regions, gaining a particularly strong following among high-technology companies in Northern California’s Silicon Valley. The city of San Francisco recently mandated that all private companies follow its lead in insuring domestic partners.

Horton’s mentor and past boss, former school board President Jackie Goldberg, successfully pushed for a domestic partner ordinance in the city of Los Angeles soon after her 1993 election to the City Council. Goldberg disclosed that she is a lesbian during her campaign for that seat, a fact that she did not make public while serving on the school board.

Critics of Horton--including the conservatives who ran against him two years ago--have characterized him as a Trojan horse because he did not come out until after his 1991 election to the school board.

“I’m very troubled by the agenda of people like Jeff who are trying to put forth the legitimacy of homosexuality, especially in our schools,” said Peter Ford, who opposed Horton in April 1995 and now hosts a conservative radio talk show on KIEV-AM. He termed the domestic partner measure “the start of a tsunami of pushing the gay agenda in our schools. . . . I don’t think it’s healthy.”

But while Goldberg proposed the domestic-partners coverage at City Hall, Horton is far from the source of the school district proposal, which would take effect in the 1998-99 school year.

Instead, the suggestion was brought forward by the district’s health and welfare committee and is backed by major employee unions.

“It really came from the unions,” Horton said. “In fact, I feel like I’m going to have to support it a little more assertively. . . . This is a fundamental equity issue.”