BUSINESS TRENDS IN DOMESTIC PARTNER BENEFITS
In the media, in corporate boardrooms, city councils and state legislatures, domestic partner benefits for employees has been the subject of heated debates. It's an issue that all of us can argue about from here to kingdom come. But whatever your view, there's no question that quietly and steadily, domestic partner benefits are being adopted by the business world.

In fact, it's corporate America where the future of gay and partner rights seem to be playing out in highly significant ways.

"That is a place where people congregate and where we are making real strides," said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese in a recent San Francisco Chronicle column. "While protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Americans are stalled in Congress, corporate America continues to surge ahead."

This year, the American workplace has reached a new milestone with the majority of Fortune 500 companies offering domestic partner health insurance benefits, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's report released in June, "The State of the Workplace for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Americans 2005-2006."

The trend began back in 1991. That year, Levi Strauss & Co. became the only Fortune company to offer domestic partner benefits. But by 1999, the number was up to 96. In another four years, that number doubled. Today, 253, or fifty-one percent, of the Fortune companies give basically the same health care or other benefits to domestic partners as to married couples. While there's little argument about which direction the domestic partner benefits trend is headed, there's still room for surprise.

"I am amazed at that figure," said Gillian Lester, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, also quoted in the Chronicle. "I really find that quite striking... I think that it is good business," Lester added. "And I think the other 50 percent ought to be paying attention."

Others, though, disagree with Lester. Eastchester, New York, became the first New York town to end benefits early last year when its town council approved new union contracts and rescinded a town policy that provided coverage for domestic partners, according to a New York Times report.

Among the objections: union members felt they had more pressing concerns; town officials wanted to save money; and one local group that opposed the policy, Family First, condemned the idea of domestic partner benefits as an effort by gay activists to promote same-sex marriage.

"This is a real victory," Family First lawyer Raymond W. Belair said in the Times article. "This was always about the gay lobby chipping away to get to marriage. And right now there is nothing more important than preserving marriage."

Whichever way a company may want to go on this issue, it's important to find out what state, county or city laws apply. And of course, it's important to consult with company attorneys. Beyond that, there's a question of what kind of public image a company wants to project.

Many companies offer domestic partner benefits because it sends an inclusive message to both clients and employees, argued Kelly Schlageter, spokeswoman for Equality Fairfax, a Northern Virginia gay and lesbian advocacy organization. "It really makes a strong statement about how open and welcoming a company is," she said in an on-line article in The Connection Newspapers.

E.J. Graff, a Brandeis University scholar and journalist who has written extensively on same-sex marriage, agreed in an on-line commentary in i-News: "It's part of the DNA of being an American citizen that you believe in fairness for all and equality for all. I don't think people actually want to stop two people who love each other from taking care of each other."

Some who oppose domestic partner benefits, however, see the benefits as a way of weakening barriers to same-sex marriage. And same-sex marriage is a proposition that many Americans are loathe to accept.

Focus on the Family, for example, used the phrase "wolf in sheep's clothing" in a recent radio newscast to characterize "gay activists who are cunningly pushing their agenda under the radar," according to the i-News article.

Public squabbling over whether to offer benefits "is not surprising," added Kristian Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, which supports traditional marriage and opposes benefits for unmarried people. "There's a lot of confusion here as to which way we are going, as a culture," he said in a recent Washington Times article. "We're in sinking sand right now ... and we need to get back on solid footing."

But while the proposal for same-sex marriage is unacceptable in a lot of quarters, many American voters seem to make a distinction between that proposition and offering domestic partner benefits.

"Americans still have a lot of caution about the word "marriage,' and that's understandable," Graff said. "It's an idea that's central to most people's lives, and to make a change in that requires a lot of thought."

But the trend in favor of domestic partner benefits will continue, some experts predict, until it becomes unusual for companies not to extend them.

"You know how we go to the theater and sit down, even when we know how the movie will end?" asked Robert Haas, the great-great-grandnephew of Levi Strauss, and the former CEO of San Francisco's Levi Strauss & Co in a recent Chronicle article. "We all know how this movie is going to end. It is just a matter of getting there."