Slashdot Mirror
Google To Add Pay To Cover a Tax For Gays
GrApHiX42 writes "Starting on Thursday, Google is going to increase the salaries of gay and lesbian employees whose partners receive domestic partner health benefits, largely to compensate them for an extra tax they must pay that heterosexual married couples do not. Google is not the first company to make up for the extra tax. At least a few large employers already do. But benefits experts say Google's move could inspire its Silicon Valley competitors to follow suit, because they compete for the same talent."
This is the angle I can never figure out. Homosexuality isn't like robbery or assault, it doesn't affect anyone except for those that participate in it. And, no, alternative sexual orientation is not a crime. The argument that a extending rights such as marriage to gay couples somehow lessens the social value of marriage is ridiculous. Following that same logical path, all those that do not practice christian marriage (Jewish, Islamic, Navajo) are also decreasing the social value of "christian" marriage.
I hope that Google's position in this matter will help influence other companies and eventually federal and state policies positively. If enough companies throw their weight behind this issue, it will become standard to offer a salary benefit for gay partners to cover the tax difference. Once it becomes standard, you can bet that companies will start lobbying congress to solve this problem in order to save them money.
Aside from the tax issues, how can anyone that appreciates the freedoms offered by our constitution and the rationale backing it in the declaration of independence, willfully discriminate against another based solely on private, personal preference? After all, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal."
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
From the article:
Working for a company as rich as Google comes with an incredible number of fringe benefits: the free food, the free laundry, the doctor on duty at company headquarters and the impressive five months of maternity leave with full pay and benefits, to mention a few.
Five months is impressive? 26 weeks (almost 6 months) is a legal right over here. In some countries it's much, much more!
In your country, a heterosexual couple can actually get married.
A gay couple can't, the unmarried heterosexual couples are depriving themselves of the benefit this type of contract provides by choice.
C17H21NO4
All Christians believe whatever they want, and justify it by selective reading of the Bible. Perhaps the fact that so many end up with "New Testament values of love and forgiveness" is comforting evidence that not everyone's inherent tendencies are towards violent opposition to people unlike themselves, but I don't think it has any bearing on what "correct" Christianity is.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I know a guy who's a former rabbi and is currently a professor of religion. He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality. Basically, you don't just rape strangers. You take them in, feed them, and so on. Even offer them one (or some) of your women. He told me a lot more about it, but I'm afraid that I can't recall all of it. I'm not offering this as a counter-argument, just as a possible interesting avenue to consider.
I don't remember exactly how it came up, but a particular jewish friend of mine and I ended up talking about the Lot story.
She was stunned to hear how Christians taught the story and pulled up the Torah, read the passage and pretty much translated it word for word the way I had it in the English. Then she became absolutely adamant that the intended meaning was that the men from the town wanted to beat the men up, not have sex with them.
Her claim was that it was not about homosexuality but a city with gangs that didn't like outsiders. I can't say as I have studied it enough to have my own opinion, but that was her take on it.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Indeed - I think it would be much better to offer the extra benefit to any unmarried partners. It solves several problems:
* It's not then unfair to people who are unmarried with opposite sex partners.
* It avoids the sticky question of whether this might be illegal discrimination. It's an interesting problem - whilst it's trying to address the original discrimination that exists, which I think is good for them to do, it's now reasonable for someone to argue that how they pay their employees is discrimination (I don't know if sexuality is a protected class for employment discrimination in the US?) Whilst technically they would still be discriminating against people who are married, this is far less repugnant (since marriage is a choice), and has far less risk of being illegal.
* Gay people don't have to out themselves - they simply say they've got an unmarried partner.
TFA says:
The extra compensation to cover the domestic partner tax will apply only to same-sex domestic partners, Mr. Bock said, because heterosexual couples can avoid the added tax by marrying.
That may be true, but there are plenty of reasons why opposite sex couples may not wish to get married (e.g., they don't want to enter in a contract for life, with all the implications and connotations that brings). An equal system must treat people the same, not create a separate class system for gay people (another example is here in the UK where we have civil partnerships for gay people - I believe that gay people should be able to get married, but it's also a problem that straight people can't have civil partnerships - not because I'm thinking "oh no, think of the poor straight people", but it's emphasising that gay people should be treated differently).
Of course, it would be a lot simpler if gay people could get married, so I hope any straight people thinking this is unfair is in favour of gay marriage.
I'm all for getting the State out of marriage. That should be a religious proposition, rather than a civil one. Benefits, taxes and the like should simply not take into account people's marital status, and instead should treat each adult as an independent entity. If you want to create a default "we share everything" contract, that allows for things like making decisions about childcare, powers of attorney and the like automatic, and that any set of people can go down to the justice of the peace and obtain for a nominal fee, I see no problem with that. It would provide the benefits marriage now provides, without the State getting involved in people's relationships.
However, your read of the Declaration is way off. It was an argument against private judgement, but an argument against class. By declaring that all men are created equal, the Declaration says that the circumstances of your birth (the wealth of your parents, the color of your skin, physical handicaps and so forth) do not change your value as a person. In other words, aristocracy is (if you accept the Declaration's self-evident truths) inherently a perversion of natural law, setting some above others by the mere circumstances of their birth.
The immediate problem that arises is "what about slavery?" If we're all supposed to be created equal, why did that not apply to slaves. The answer is not a moral answer, but a crass political answer. The economy of the South was predicated on slavery; take away slavery and the South would have sunk into deep poverty. (Even if not true, and I am not convinced that it is true, it was a view nearly universally held by Southerners in the 1780s, when the Constitution was written.) The question of allowing slavery was thus an existential question for the South: if slavery were not allowed, the southern states could not be part of the United States and continue to exist with any hope of prosperity. For the North, slavery was not an issue, simply because their economy was predicated on shipping and trade instead of pre-industrial agriculture. So for the northern states, the imperative was to hold the states together into a single country, to avoid the constant warfare that existed in Europe from the fall of Rome to the end of WWII. Essentially, the South would not yield on slavery, and the North would not yield on there being a single nation in the former colonies. The obvious compromise was to allow slavery, despite the fact that it was a contravention of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
If you see in that the setup for the Civil War, congratulations. It has been said that all of American history can be summed up as "Pickett's Charge, the events leading to it and the consequences thereof." This misunderstanding of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, along with the death of Federalism (particularly subsidiarity) and the triumph of the French Enlightenment over the English Enlightenment, are some of the sadder of those consequences.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality.
This is supported by Ezekiel chapter 16:
Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me.
The men of Sodom were certainly sodomites, but that's not why their city burned.
Oh, sure. Typical gay-agenda, liberal bleating about the rank hypocrisy that pervades most of what passes for Christianity in the U.S. today. How dare you call attention to such inconvenient contradictions in their book of folk tales... er, holy writ? A lot of people have paid a lot of good money to good Christian leaders like Ted Haggerty and George Rekers so that they can feel good about hating gay people. And now you want them to start hating shell-fish eaters and wearers of poly-cotton blends?
You insensitive clod.