A New Era Set to Begin in Benefits for Gay Couples

Starting Tuesday, $8 and a visit to a notary will bring same-sex couples in Hawaii a degree of legitimacy unprecedented in this country.

With a state certificate declaring them “reciprocal beneficiaries,” they will qualify for dozens of legal rights and benefits typically reserved for the married, ranging from the ability to sign up for family medical insurance to filing a domestic violence complaint.

Approved by the Hawaii Legislature earlier this year, the beneficiaries law is the most dramatic and far-reaching example of a steadily building national trend.

While same-sex marriage remains a highly controversial possibility, domestic partner benefits of one sort or another are becoming an everyday reality for more and more gay couples.

A recent survey by the accounting firm KPMG Peat Marwick indicates that nearly a quarter of employers nationwide with more than 5,000 workers provide health benefits to nontraditional partners, often straight as well as gay.

In a landmark move that took effect last month, the city of San Francisco is requiring its contractors to offer domestic partner coverage to their employees.

Measures related to domestic partner issues have been introduced in more than a half-dozen state legislatures, including California’s, where the Assembly last month approved a bill dealing with the availability of health insurance.

Ironically, the furor over same-sex marriage has boosted the effort to gain formal recognition for gay couples outside of marriage--both by highlighting their lack of legal rights and by casting domestic partnership in a comparatively less radical light.

“In effect, the controversy over marriage aids and pushes the domestic partner movement as well,” said Richard Jennings, executive director of Hollywood Supports, an advocacy group that lobbies for such policies. “Domestic partnership is starting to look like the conservative alternative.”

Not to social conservatives, who find domestic partnership rights as distasteful as same-sex marriage. They have filed lawsuits to block domestic partner policies in the public sector. They have fired off angry letters to private corporations and, in the recent case of the Southern Baptist Convention protesting the Walt Disney Co.’s insurance benefits for same-sex partners and other “gay friendly” policies, launched a boycott.

Give nontraditional couples rights and benefits, conservatives argue, and you erode the importance of marriage as an institution.

“This is a probing attack on traditional cultural assumptions that marriage is unique in our society,” said Benjamin W. Bull, senior counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, which represents a firm suing to overturn the San Francisco ordinance. “The whole domestic partner issue is the battleground on which the war of cultural values is going to be fought in the next decade.”

In the realm of public opinion, domestic partnership is not nearly as contentious as same-sex marriage.

A recent Field poll, for instance, showed that while more than half the California public disapproves of same-sex marriages, a larger majority, 67%, favor granting domestic partners legal rights such as hospital visitation, medical power of attorney and conservatorship.

By a 59% to 35% margin, Californians also approve of giving domestic partners family leave, pension and heath insurance coverage and death benefits.

“The public is still not ready to accept same-sex marriage,” said Mervin Field, the poll’s associate director. “But they’re ready to give family rights to domestic partners. [The public feels] the idea of two gays living together and committing themselves to each other and devoting years to that is something that should be recognized and favored.”

In Hawaii, it was the threat of same-sex marriage that prodded the Legislature into adopting the most comprehensive package of rights and benefits ever accorded nontraditional couples in the United States.

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By crafting the reciprocal beneficiaries law, marriage opponents won support for another bill, passed at the same time, intended to short-circuit a state court case, now on appeal, that could legalize same-sex marriage in Hawaii within the next two years.

The companion bill places on the November 1998 state ballot a constitutional amendment that would give the Legislature the power to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples.

The beneficiaries law “is a reaction to the same-sex marriage case,” said Hawaii attorney Dan Foley, who represents three gay couples suing the state for marriage rights. “We don’t accept this act as a substitute to marriage. It’s still separate and unequal. But we think it’s a positive step.”

The legislation, which takes effect Tuesday, confers about 60 benefits and privileges involving inheritance, insurance coverage, joint property and victims’ rights.

Once registered with the state, couples will be able to jointly apply for disaster relief loans and auto insurance. The partner of a state employee will be eligible for survivor retirement benefits.

If one partner dies in an auto accident, the survivor will be able to sue for wrongful death. If one assaults the other, the victim can file a domestic violence complaint. And if one partner becomes mentally incompetent, the other will be able to sign commitment papers.

Private employers that offer family health coverage to married workers must also offer the same to reciprocal beneficiaries, who can be any two adults legally barred from marrying and who are otherwise not married. They simply have to fill out a notarized declaration and pay an $8 fee to obtain a state certificate.

A widow and her son, or for that matter two heterosexuals of the same gender, could register under the program--a fact that has prompted Hawaii’s governor to suggest that the law’s eligibility may need to be narrowed.

Elsewhere, domestic partner policies are not nearly so encompassing. Private and public employers typically provide health insurance coverage and family and bereavement leave. Survivor retirement benefits are sometimes included. Some companies restrict the benefits to family and bereavement leave.

Business analysts say initial concerns about the cost of adding domestic partner coverage have largely fallen by the wayside, as participation rates have been lower than expected.

If the coverage is available to same-sex couples only, less than 1% of a company work force usually enrolls, increasing medical costs slightly. If enrollment is open to unmarried heterosexual couples as well, up to 3% of the work force may sign up, raising medical costs about 1.5%, said Ilse de Veer of William Mercer Inc., an international benefits consulting firm.

In Los Angeles, where health coverage was extended to the unmarried partners of both straight and gay employees in 1993, only 450 of the city’s 34,000 workers have signed up, benefits manager Henry Hurd said. Of those, 80% are heterosexual.

Businesses attribute the low enrollment rates to several factors: Both partners in unmarried couples usually work and thus often have their own individual insurance. The federal government taxes workers on the value of the benefits. And for gay employees, there are concerns that if they sign up, they are effectively outing themselves.

Still, de Veer said domestic partner benefits “help recruit people who might not need the benefits because of the message it sends.”

The impetus to expand corporate benefits often comes from within, from gay employee groups that have grown in number and visibility in recent years. But companies also cite a competitive factor, saying the policies can help recruit and retain workers, a particular concern in today’s tight labor market.

Although the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney was in part sparked by the entertainment giant’s 1995 adoption of benefits for same-sex partners, such high-profile protests are the exception.

“It’s typically something that raises discussion for a short time and then it dies out,” said Dorothy Weaver of Hewitt Associates, a benefits and compensation consulting firm that estimates about 500 private and public employers nationwide offer such coverage. Neither Weaver nor de Veer were aware of any company that has dropped domestic partner benefits after adopting them.

When Coors Brewing Co. in Golden, Colo., extended health benefits to same-sex couples two years ago, communications manager Joe Fuentes said, there was a brief, minor flap internally and externally “that just went away.”

“We had a few letters from people saying, ‘We can’t believe you’re doing this,’ ” recalled Fuentes. “Our position has always been that it’s not a moral statement. It’s an employee benefit, and we’ve always maintained a leadership role in employee benefits.”

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In the two months since the Chevron Corp. announced it would become the first major oil company to offer domestic partner benefits, spokeswoman Alison Jones said, the company has “gotten lots of reaction, both positive and negative.”

Based in San Francisco, Chevron was nudged by the city’s contractor ordinance, Jones said, but had been “tracking domestic partner benefits for several years with the thought that some day we would do this.”

Most prevalent in government, academia and such industries as high-tech and entertainment, the benefits are spreading into other quarters.

Among those that have or are adopting the policies are American Express, Apple Computer, Bank of America, Southern California Gas Co., IBM, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the state of New York.

The policies are more controversial in the public sector, where lawsuits have been filed against various cities challenging their authority to grant the benefits.

Minneapolis was forced to drop them two years ago after a state appeals court ruled that Minnesota law did not recognize same-sex partners as spouses. Similar suits are pending in Chicago, Atlanta and Denver. Voters in Austin, Texas, repealed a domestic partner ordinance several years ago.

Two lawsuits have been filed against San Francisco’s ordinance, one by Bull’s organization and one by airlines that use the San Francisco airport. They argue the city has no right to issue mandates to the airline industry, which is regulated by the federal government.

Although the challenges revolve around dry legal issues, they usually spring from a deep philosophical opposition to formal recognition of couples outside of heterosexual marriage.

“What [gay-rights advocates] really want is whatever an individual chooses as a partnership. . . . The government and society has to recognize it and protect it legally,” said Virginia attorney Jordan Lorence, who is involved in the Chicago suit. “That to me is a recipe for chaos.”

A conservative Christian group in Arizona, the Alliance Defense Fund, is funding his work and supporting several of the other city challenges, Lorence said.

On the state legislative front, there has been an increase in pro-domestic partnership proposals, but not a rush to enact them. Of four such bills introduced in California this session, only one has moved forward.

The Assembly-approved measure would require health insurance companies to offer employers the option of providing domestic partner coverage to their workers. But most major insurance carriers in the state already do that.

Among the stalled bills is a statewide registry proposal, similar to legislation vetoed by Gov. Pete Wilson in 1994, that would grant domestic partners limited rights such as hospital visitation and conservatorship.

Gay rights proponent Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica) is nonetheless optimistic.

“The notion of domestic partnership seems more and more familiar and, frankly, more acceptable as local governments and corporations adopt it. I predict in the next couple of years we will see state legislatures going this way.”

“I don’t see it plateauing,” she said of the domestic partnership movement, “unless gay marriage is made legal.”