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Jun 17, 2010
In addition to expanding employee benefits for the same-sex partners of federal workers, President Barack Obama proclaimed June LGBT Pride Month. In his proclamation, the president said that since Independence Day Americans have strived to create a nation where all are created equal, with the same rights, privileges and opportunities. – Photo: Courtesy
Under presidential order, the executive branch of the U.S. government is expanding its benefits package for employees with same-sex partners to include benefits already offered opposite-sex married couples.
President Barack Obama announced the added partnership benefits in early June, kicking off LGBT Pride Month with a memorandum requiring executive agencies to act quickly to extend to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees family assistance services, hardship transfers and relocation expenses.
“Fair access to relocation, support, family and medical leave protections, child care services, retiree pension annuities and the range of other benefits offered … to federal employees will make an immense practical difference to the many thousands of LGBT workers who serve the American public,” said Jennifer Pizer, marriage project director for Lambda Legal, a national LGBT rights group.
The president’s memorandum also requires that agencies offering new benefits to employees with opposite-sex spouses make those benefits available to employees with same-sex domestic partners “to the extent permitted by law.” The law referenced in the document is the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman and limits how the federal government treats same-sex couples. Obama has repeatedly called for the repeal of DOMA, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996, when it seemed Hawaii might legalize marriage for same-sex couples.
Obama, in a statement in early June, said, “My Administration continues to be prevented by existing federal law from providing same-sex domestic partners with the full range of benefits enjoyed by heterosexual married couples.”
The president urged the House and Senate to pass the Domestic Partnership Benefits and Obligations Act, sponsored in the Senate by Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins and in the House by Tammy Baldwin.
The bill would extend to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees the full range of benefits currently enjoyed by federal employees’ opposite-sex spouses.
“I look forward to signing it into law,” Obama stated.
Baldwin, D-Wis., said the president’s memorandum was encouraging, as was his call for swift passage of the partnership benefits legislation.
“It is high time we extend to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees all of the benefits currently enjoyed by the opposite-sex spouses of federal employees,” the congresswoman said.
The legislation and the presidential memorandum deal with civilian federal employees, not members of the U.S. Armed Forces.
