I thought I’d open a new thread instead of dragging the “legal proof of homosexuality” thread further astray. . .
So, from the lists of criteria for any domestic partnership I’ve seen, I’ve noticed that. . . um. . . boinking is not a criterium-- there are sometimes vague things like “having a relationship similar to a legal marriage” but that isn’t terribly explicit (and doesn’t necessarily suggest boinking either, as I’m sure some disgruntled married people would attest). So, say, a gay guy and a straight woman who are housemates and apply for a domestic partnership (or two straight women or two gay women who aren’t boinking) aren’t “faking” anything , are they? To what degree is the notion of a legal domestic relationship (marriage or dom. partnership) predicated by sexual acts? Is it really at issue at all?
Not in San Francisco. (all snickering cheerfully ignored)
SF has a domestic partner’s policy (United Airlines, whch has its largest maintenance facility here, theratened to pull out of SF over this - maybe it’s going to be a moot point).
As I understand it, the benefits accrue from a simple registration with the city/county govt - no blood test, nothing.
The concept is that since marrieds are covered under employer-provided benefits, and gays can’t get married, we can at least require employers to provide the same benes to partners as to spouses.
Of course, the logical action would be to recognize gay unions as marriages, but we’re a Christian nation, so that can never happen. So much for “universal love”… :rolleyes:
It depends on who’s establishing the concept of “domestic partnership” and for what purpose.
I have to grapple with this professionally, when advising employers who are establishing pension plans, and who wish to extend survivors’ benefits to the non-marital partners (of either sex) of plan members.
I generally advise that whether the non-marital couple have sexual intercourse or not is not the point– after all, there are married couples who don’t have sex, and we don’t agonise over whether they should get survivors’ benefits. It is also impractical – there is no way to know whether a couple have sex and it is extremely insensitive to ask, especially when one of them has just died.
And, in the context of a pension plan, it’s irrelevant. The survivor’s benefit is intended partly to replace the deceased’s earnings,on which the partner was dependent, and which the partner expected to continue to receive. So what we’re looking for here is some a significant degree of financial interdependence or pooling of resources, plus evidence that this was a committed arrangement, which the couple saw as continuing indefinitely and from which they did not regard themselves as (morally) free to withdraw from at any time without reason. In other words, it needs to look like a marriage from a financial point of view, not a sexual point of view.
A useful extra test in some cases is to ask yourself whether the couple were free to marry. If they were free to marry but chose not to, the implication would be that they want to keep their relationship private and not to seek social or legal recognition of it, and this weighs against giving them survivor’s benefits. If, on the other hand, they were not free to marry (because one of them is married to someone else, or because they are gay) there is no such implication. For this reason some employers draft plan rules which provide non-marital partners with survivor’s benefits only in cases where the couple were not free to marry.
You might, of course, adopt quite different criteria if you were establishing the concept in a context other than for determining who should receive survivors’ benefits under a pension plan.