Asheville City Councilman-elect Gordon Smith

Quote from the Asheville Citizen-Times:

Councilman-elect Gordon Smith said Friday he will try to extend domestic partner benefits as one of his first priorities.

“That is one I'm going to be pushing fairly quickly,” Smith said.

A majority of incoming and sitting council members said in interviews Friday on top priorities for the new council that they support providing benefits like health insurance and bereavement leave to partners of gay employees in committed relationships.

Smith during his campaign said that gays in committed relationships should have “equal rights under the law” as married heterosexuals and the city should lead the way by changing its rules.

He could bring the issue up as soon as Dec. 8, when new council members are sworn in.

Comments

[Josie]

Kudos to Gordon! I like what I see already...

[greenashevilleblogspot.com]

Asheville, get ready for sustainable higher taxes! Asheville is going green (money=taxes)!

[momforequalrights]

Yea! I'm proud of him.

[Cecil Bothwell]

The AC-T didn't report my position accurately. I told Joel Burgess that I support domestic partner benefits, period. That is, I believe that such benefits need to be extended regardless of gender or sexual orientation to qualifying couples. Otherwise I don't believe that such a plan would stand up in court.

Such a plan would presumably follow the lead of private employers who provide such benefits and would require proof of a contractual relationship (co-ownership of property, joint bank account, joint credit accounts, shared custody or child adoption, etc. and etc. -- precise rules to be determined) extending for a minimum of 6 months. A change in status would remove eligibility and a new application for benefits would probably require a 12 month waiting period, with the same rules.

This follows a general trend of separating marriage as a religious matter from marriage as a contractual matter, which is actually the only reason government got involved in marriage in the first place. The government is concerned about property ownership, apportionment of inheritance, apportionment of debt and, of course, tax obligations—not who loves whom or under which tradition the marriage was created. It has traditionally yielded to religions concerning the baseline rules: i.e. Catholics were prohibited from remarriage after divorce, which pushed some Catholics to cohabit and thus give up their joint Social Security and other government entitlements. On the other hand, of course, it rejected some religious positions: i.e. Mormons who practiced polygamy could not apportion government benefits to multiple spouses.