Boston Globe Leads the Way in Damaging Gay Employees

       The Boston Globe reported yesterday that it is one of many large companies with offices in Massachusetts, including IBM, Raytheon, and Bay State Health Systems, which are withdrawing benefits packages to partners of gay employees.    Among them is the parent company of the Globe itself, the New York Times.
       The reasoning is sound.  Before gay marriage was legal, a gay couple could not “marry”, and thus, a company that wanted to be perceived as “gay friendly” needed to offer a special domestic partner program to extend benefits to same-sex couples.
         However, now that gay marriage for the time being is legal, a company must offer domestic benefits to unmarried heterosexual couples, or else it would be discriminatory to offer them to unmarried homosexual couples. Consequently, hundreds of gay couples in the Bay State are now losing benefits for one of the partners. 
       The Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders,(GLAD), is not at all happy about this. Despite the fact that they were the ones who fought so hard to legalize gay marriage, they still call this an “unfair hardship”.
       Why is it an “unfair hardship” when a company equalizes its policies to avoid discrimination? In this case, it is because very few gay couples were actually interested in getting married. If one includes all of the applicants from all over the country who came to Massachusetts to get married since May 17, the number is somewhere around 4000 couples. It is difficult to avoid the fact that most of those “marriages” were from out-of-state couples.
       While arguing the Goodridge decision, GLAD frequently harped on the statistic (based on the 2000 census) that there were 19,000 same-sex coupled households in the state that were waiting to tie the knot, and it was believed that those households were only a fraction of all the Massachusetts couples who would be seeking marriage. After all the hype and hyperbole, the actual percentage of committed homosexual couples in this state who applied for a marriage license might be around 4% of all such eligible couples or households.  That would mean 96% of committed gay couples/households would be subject to losing benefits.
       This whole affords yet another example of how social engineering by the liberals all too often hurts the very people they are purporting to help.    In many ways, it parallels the unintended consequences of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Margaret Marshall may not have been so adamant on implementing gay marriage had she known that in less than a year, the majority of homosexuals in the Massachusetts were going to face negative financial repercussions as a direct result.  In similar fashion, paternalistic legislators may not have been so enamored with the Civil Rights Act, if they knew that one generation later, it would be foundation for State-endorsed racism, quota systems, and the origination of a great urban welfare plantation that has only hurt minorities and women.   Nobody needed a crystal ball to see this coming.  They just needed an honest assessment of history.