Commentary –

Decide Gay Marriage Issue In An Open, Democratic Way

By Chris Powell

An arbiter determining contract terms between the state government and its unionized employees has concluded that medical insurance benefits should be extended to the homosexual partners of state employees. While such a provision was opposed by the Rowland administration in negotiations, it is expected to win approval by the General Assembly. It shouldn’t.

The provision is not objectionable because it legitimizes homosexuality; Connecticut did that by statute more than 20 years ago.

No, it is objectionable first because medical insurance benefits for spouses, having been meant to facilitate child rearing by helping workers care for dependents, is not needed in any practical sense and thus is simply unnecessary compensation. The claim that state government should extend medical insurance benefits to “domestic partners” to attract better employees is ridiculous because on average state employees already are better compensated and insured than private-sector workers and because such a claim could be made equally for extending insurance to the unmarried partners of heterosexual employees as well.

The provision is objectionable second because it legitimizes homosexual marriage.

Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with homosexual marriage, or with government’s giving homosexual couples some device roughly equivalent to ordinary marriage for formalizing their commitment to each other. But legitimizing homosexual marriage is a matter of high importance in public policy and social arrangements, and, as such, it should be decided by the people’s elected representatives forthrightly, by itself, not by an unelected arbiter behind the camouflage of a mere contract between the government and its employees, where soon it nevertheless will be claimed as precedent for all sorts of things that never were legislated democratically.

While the contract with insurance benefits for “domestic partners” has to go before the legislature for ratification, unfortunately a simple majority vote will not be enough to reject it. By law Connecticut already has squandered so much of its public sovereignty to its supposed employees that such contracts automatically take effect unless a two-thirds majority can be mustered against them in either the state Senate or the House of Representatives.

Getting a majority vote in the legislature for the public interest, which is seldom mobilized, against the special interest, which is always mobilized, is hard enough. Getting a two-thirds vote might require the second coming – at least of George Washington, who led a revolution against the form of government into which Connecticut has been regressing, wherein all the important decisions of government are removed from the democratic process and decided by someone who never has to account for them. In Washington’s day it was called monarchy. Today it’s called “binding arbitration.”

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)