Monday, November 12, 2007

The State News: Mich. Supreme Court hears case for same-sex benefits

The State News: Mich. Supreme Court hears case for same-sex benefits

By Brian McVicar The State News Published: November 6, 2007
Lansing — Lawyers clashed over whether the state’s gay-marriage ban prohibits same-sex domestic partner benefits Tuesday before the Michigan Supreme Court.
The Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is appealing a February 2007 decision by the Michigan Court of Appeals that ruled same-sex domestic partner benefits are prohibited under the state’s gay-marriage ban. The ban was passed by voters in the 2004 general election.
The lawsuit could determine the future of same-sex domestic partner benefits for university and public employees.
To comply with the Michigan Court of Appeals ruling, MSU eliminated same-sex domestic partner benefits in June. It replaced them with Other Eligible Individual, or OEI, benefits in July.
Under the new program, an MSU employee may enroll another person onto the plan as long as they have lived together for 18 months, that person isn’t a dependent of the employee and he or she can’t inherit from the employee.
Deborah LaBelle, an attorney for the Michigan chapter of the ACLU, said Michigan voters passed the proposal to preserve the sanctity of marriage.
“No one thought that they were stripping those health benefits from those people and their children,” LaBelle said. “There’s not a word about those kind of health benefits in there, there’s not even a word of domestic partnerships in there.”
LaBelle said she isn’t sure whether MSU’s program, which has stricter eligibility requirements than its previous program, will be affected by the court’s ruling. University officials couldn’t be reached for comment.
Grace Wojcik, chairwoman for The Alliance of LBGTA Students at MSU, said a legal challenge to MSU’s program has serious consequences.
“I think it’s highly important we cover all employees of the university,” Wojcik said, adding that everyone deserves health benefits regardless of sexual affiliation.
“People who voted for Proposal 2 maybe didn’t know all the ramifications of the proposal,” Wojcik said. “I think if more people knew what would have happened after it was passed they would have voted differently.”
But Matt Frendewey, spokesman for the Michigan Attorney General’s Office, said the proposal was clear.
The proposal, approved by 58 percent of the public, stated “the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.”
“I think (the ACLU’s argument) offends the intelligence of the citizens of Michigan,” Frendewey said.
To uphold the state’s gay-marriage ban, employers need to use standards other than marriage to determine who receives benefits, Frendewey said.
LaBelle, however, said health benefits are granted by employers. They aren’t a privilege granted solely by marriage.
“Heterosexuals recognize that simply giving a health benefit to someone doesn’t make it equivalent to a marriage,” LaBelle said. “To say the fact that there is some eligibility criteria for domestic partnership that overlap with marriage and then to equate those two as similar unions for purposes of looking at this amendment I also think is absurd.”
Published on Tuesday, November 6, 2007
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