Members of the Benefits Advisory Committee and the President’s Executive Committee should endorse the new proposal that would give gay or lesbian partners and other domiciled adults access to University health care plans.
In September, Senior Vice President Spiros Dimolitsas and General Counsel Jane Genster proposed this expansion of the University health care policy. If the policy is passed, individuals in close personal relationships with faculty members-including both blood relatives and tax-dependent non-relatives-will be eligible for benefits.
By implementing this proposal, Georgetown would make another move toward equal rights and benefits for gay and lesbian faculty, a stance already taken by nearly every other university that is consistently ranked with and compared to Georgetown. The University of Notre Dame is the only other school ranked among Newsweek’s top 25 universities that has not given equal benefits to gay and lesbian staff.
Georgetown’s tardiness is not surprising given the Catholic Church’s antagonism toward the gay rights movement. For this reason, perhaps, the proposal cloaks the issue of same-sex relationships in innocuous terminology, like “legally domiciled adults … in a very close relationship.”
Despite the Church’s position, this new policy reflects core Jesuit values of tolerance and concern for others, values that seem more a part of Catholic teaching than the specific opposition to gay rights. We praise Georgetown’s administration for finding a way to extend these benefits to same-sex couples, even if it required some inventive wording.
This change will help the University attract gay and lesbian professors who previously may have been deterred. Improving benefits in general increases Georgetown’s competitiveness as an educational institution and will help create greater pluralism on campus.
University President John J. DeGioia has demonstrated support for the change and encouraged its implementation. For this, DeGioia and others responsible for the proposal deserve commendation.
Georgetown shouldn’t stop here though. Credit, tuition and childcare benefits should also be amended to account for non-traditional family arrangements. There remains ambiguity in University policy regarding child eligibility for daycare and tuition when the child’s legal guardian is the same-sex partner of a Georgetown employee.
We praise the administration for these positive steps, and we hope that the Advisory Committee and the President’s Executive Committee ratify the policy. Hopefully, it is just the first step in a wider movement to provide substantive equality for Georgetown employees regardless of sexual orientation.
