Wilson Stacks the Board but Loses a Fight Against Fairness

How humiliating for us that a University of California vice chancellor should have felt the need last week to rise at a public meeting to identify his gay partner of 16 years. Or that a sociology professor had to produce her adopted son and female companion of many years as proof that they are a family, while a doctor spoke of watching her mate of 11 years slowly die of breast cancer because she wasn’t covered by the doctor’s medical plan.

All this sharing of intimacy and grief just to convince the governor of California and his fellow university regents that gay relationships can be of sufficient seriousness to warrant common medical benefits. Yet no such proof would be required of a married couple in even the most unstable of relationships. Indeed, treatment of the traumas of spousal abuse are commonly covered by medical plans.

Why are we, in this day and age, still denying that many people live in stable same-sex relationships that carry the deep, caring commitments of heterosexual ones? Why should payments made by gays into medical plans not cover their loved ones?

In the end, by a one-vote margin, the regents voted for this practical and humane change in the university’s medical insurance plan. But not before Gov. Pete Wilson, who stacked the board with three new members hours before the decision was taken, had managed another of his cynical pitches to the far right.

Wilson, in case you haven’t noticed, is once again running for president and seeks to prove to the Republican Party’s right wing that although he is pro-choice, he is in no sense a moderate. Toward that end, he has seized every opportunity to scapegoat the poor, minorities and immigrants. But evidently his bashing of welfare mothers, affirmative action and illegal immigrants is not enough, and now gays must also be thrown into the hopper of hate.

Medical coverage for partners of gays, the governor insisted, was “devaluing the institution of marriage and the family.” What rubbish. Marriage is not the issue here. If gays could legally marry, an obvious civil right, we wouldn’t be having this controversy. What is at issue is whether a gay couple that commingles its finances and otherwise shares the risks of living together should also be entitled to share the caring.

The governor, ever eager to divide and conquer, argued that extending medical coverage to gay partners would discriminate against unmarried heterosexual couples. As if he cares. If this is a deal breaker, then extend medical coverage to heterosexuals who meet the same criteria as required of gay partners--proof that they have lived together for a year, provide mutual financial support and commit in writing to a long-term relationship.

I favor such a broadening of benefits, but there is a difference in that heterosexuals do have the option of legal marriage, which gays do not. On advice of counsel, the regents did expand coverage to dependent siblings or parents who live with the employee but who, like gays, cannot be legally related by marriage.

What Wilson is attacking here is not gay marriage but gay commitment, compassion and caring. That gay couples share the bonds of love and responsibility in serious relationships that deserve the respect conferred by joint benefits has already been accepted by many major universities, including Harvard, Stanford, MIT and Michigan, as well as an increasing number of corporations.

But Wilson’s histrionics once again brought raves from the far right. No less a gay-basher than the Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, leader of what claims to be the “Traditional Values Coalition,” proclaimed that “Pete Wilson’s colors shone brilliantly.” Indeed they did.

But tolerance is a traditional virtue. As conservative regent Ward Connerly, the father of Proposition 209, said in voting against Wilson: “There are values that transcend marriage: the value of equality, the value of individual liberty and the value of letting people pursue happiness on their own terms.”

What a sad commentary on the state of the Republican Party that Wilson, once a true moderate and sensible fellow, feels the need to prove his credentials by lowering himself so. Better to vote for an honest conservative of principle than this mealy- mouthed hypocrite whose only claim to fame is his ability to play Halloween year round by putting on whatever mask will frighten the largest number of impressionable voters.