Employees of the Boston Newspaper Guild - home of the very liberal Boston Globe - received a memo informing them that health/dental benefits for homosexual partners is being discontinued.
“An employee who currently covers a same-sex domestic partner as a dependent will have to marry his or her partner by Jan. 1 for the employee benefits coverage to continue at the employee rates,” the memo states.
The Globe and other Massachusetts companies found themselves in a pickle...
- They don't offer "domestic partnership benefits" to unmarried heterosexuals, but offered them to unmarried homosexuals because they could not marry. Now that they can, it's hard to defend offering them to unmarried homosexuals...
- Yet it seems quite bizarre to demand that any couple get married, and to set a deadline...
- It's unclear how the Globe will handle situations where the homosexual employee resides in Massachusetts, but the currently covered partner resides outside Massachusetts (and thus cannot legally marry, even in Massachusetts)...
- The Globe will continue to offer "domestic partnership benefits" to unmarried homosexual employees who reside in other states where homosexual marriage is not legal...so an unmarried homosexual couple could decline to marry, but transfer to a position in another state and again be covered.
A few descriptive terms come to mind: inconsistent, illogical, inane, immoral.
