When the city of Cambridge issues paychecks to its public employees, nearly two dozen workers find a federal tax on their income that their colleagues don’t have to pay.
Like many people, these 22 school and city workers chose to put their spouses on their employer-provided health insurance. Because they’re in a homosexual relationship, the value of that health coverage is considered taxable income by the federal government.
But starting this month, Cambridge will become what is believed to be the first municipality in the country to pay its public employees a stipend in an attempt to defray the cost of the federal tax on health benefits for their same-sex spouses.
The city employees hit by the extra tax pay an additional $1,500 to $3,000 in taxes a year and officials estimate the stipends would cost the city an additional $33,000.
[. . .]
“This is ultimately a fairness issue. Two people who do the exact same job should be paid exactly the same for what they are doing at work,” said Leland Cheung, a Cambridge City Councilor who pushed for a proposal with fellow councilor E. Denise Simmons, who is openly gay.
And if you’re an unmarried worker and you add a dependent to your health insurance, will Cambridge be paying the extra tax? Don’t be silly. This isn’t really about equal pay for equal work. This was merely a publicity stunt by the city of Cambridge to signal what side of the politically-correct divide they are on.
C’mon, Cambridge, your gay-friendly bona fides weren’t in question. You could have just sent out a “Down with DOMA!” press release and saved your taxpayers the extra $33,000. Now some irate unmarried worker is going to call your fairness bluff and make you look like fools.
July 12th, 2011 | 10:14 am
“This is ultimately a fairness issue. Two people who do the exact same job should be paid exactly the same for what they are doing at work”
Um, guy, then why are you pushing for homosexuals to make MORE for the same job? Are you really incapable of holding a coherent thought long enough to utter a complete sentence?
July 12th, 2011 | 11:11 am
“Um, guy, then why are you pushing for homosexuals to make MORE for the same job? Are you really incapable of holding a coherent thought long enough to utter a complete sentence?”
Reading comprehension must not be your thing, but it is obvious that same-sex married couples are being reimbursed for the extra tax penalty that they suffer because of discriminatory federal tax law, pursuant to DOMA. The city is merely compensating gays for the discriminatory federal tax legislation in order to make them equally paid to heterosexual couples.
Regarding theoretical claims of unfairness by unmarried workers, the response is that unmarried people are not similarly situated to married people. amongst the class of married people, all must be/should be treated the same in wages, benefits, taxation, without regard to the sex/gender pairing. moreover, unmarried people are not paying a tax penalty equivalent to the penalty same-sex married copules pay. unmarried people are not similarly situated to married people, and thus, there is a legitimate government reason for treating them differently.
July 12th, 2011 | 11:19 am
Javier: Too funny. Now “equally paid” is apparently supposed to mean AFTER taxation. Well, once you start redefining the meaning of common words, I guess there’s no point in stopping, huh?
July 12th, 2011 | 11:20 am
Reading comprehension must not be your thing, but it is obvious that same-sex married couples are being reimbursed for the extra tax penalty that they suffer because of discriminatory federal tax law, pursuant to DOMA.
“Reverse discrimination”, in other words. Google and Facebook have been doing this a while.
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-to-reimburse-gay-employees-for-health-benefit-tax-2010-12
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/tech/Google-to-Pay-More-for-Gay-Employees-97581254.html
Considering how it’s been quite the rage among certain tech companies lately, I’m surprised it hasn’t turned up in the news media already.
July 12th, 2011 | 12:06 pm
Brian is right — paying someone extra to compensate for tax laws is not the *employer* treating employees equally. The employer is treating them “more equally” than other people in light of the tax laws.
July 12th, 2011 | 12:14 pm
The law of employment discrimination is inherently ridiculous and unstable. It seems just yesterday (although really it’s been a few decades now) that we went around banning discrimination on the basis of “marital status.” Of course, back then, being against “marital status” discrimination was the correct, feminist position, because it meant (i) getting rid of the practice (very common two or three generations ago) of paying married fathers a wage sufficient to support their families, even if their unmarried coworkers made less for doing the same job, and (ii) getting rid of the social stigma against bastardy (i.e., no more firing the unmarried woman who turns up pregnant).
July 12th, 2011 | 1:53 pm
Although I wouldn’t want to try invoking Catholic Social Teaching to argue in favor of what Cambridge is doing, it is certainly the right (and in fact the duty) under Catholic Social Teaching to consider what specific workers need. It would be perfectly defensible under CST for an employer to pay, say, a husband who was married to a non-working wife taking care of five children more than an employee who was single. (I probably shouldn’t limit this just to CST. It seems to me a Christian idea, not just a Catholic one.) I think most Americans would probably say it was unjust to pay two people who do exactly the same job different wages, but then most Americans put many of their capitalist views ahead of much of Christian belief.
July 12th, 2011 | 2:25 pm
David — I don’t really disagree with you in principle.
Now stop and think about what the general reaction to any organization that paid a husband with children more than a single, childless woman would be paid for comparable work with comparable credentials and experience.
And think about not just people in general, but how many of the people who were cool with that idea, would be inclined to support the bonus for people in same sex marriages.
And then consider how the group of people inclined to support the SSM bonus would otherwise be expected to react to the idea that the City of Cambridge was basing its compensation policies on “Catholic social teaching.”
I can’t imagine any single actual human being who would support all of these ideas at the same time because they believed them, as opposed merely for the purpose of trying to confound Joe Carter’s point.
July 12th, 2011 | 4:16 pm
Reading comprehension must not be your thing, but it is obvious that same-sex married couples are being reimbursed for the extra tax penalty that they suffer because of discriminatory federal tax law, pursuant to DOMA.
In other words, it’s okay to discriminate against one group, if you feel that someone else has discriminated against another group, and you’re just trying to balance the books.
By the way, the reason gays pay more is because they do not qualify for the benefits of marriage. That is what DOMA is all about: the recognition that marriage is linked to the act of making a family – gays cannot ever be kin to each other (except through lies and fraud), and so have no reason to be each others’ dependents.
July 12th, 2011 | 5:25 pm
A question for anyone commenting here: What justifies the state’s interest in providing income tax preferences for married individuals?
If the answer is that the state has an interest in advancing the welfare of children, then there is a prima facie case for providing an income tax benefit for a married heterosexual couple on the basis that, ceteris parabus, they are likely to have offspring. No such case exists for same-sex couples. If you want to argue in favor of same-sex couples who adopt, I would argue that there is ample research that shows that children do best raised in a family where there are two parents—a mother and a father. Presumably, this has something to do with learning from one’s parental role models.
On what basis ought the state provide the encouragement of a tax preference to two men (or two women) to “marry” and adopt one or more children knowing in advance that allowing, let alone encouraging, that to occur is, at least in a statistically sense, less than fully advantageous to any children who would be adopted? I would suggest that, in a rational world, there is no sound basis on which the state ought to do so.
Secondarily, paying an employee more because he has a larger family, pace Leo XIII and John Paul II, violates the principal of a “fair wage” as established by the late Spanish scholastics, Domingo de Soto and Luis de Molina, was the amount freely agreed between the employer and the employee. Paying one employee more than such a price means at least one less employee who can be employed. How would anyone consider if fair to pay someone more than his work earns, when doing so means someone else will be unemployed as a consequence?
Pax et bonum,
Keith Töpfer
July 12th, 2011 | 11:55 pm
If every orphan in the world had multiple heterosexual married couples vying to be their adoptive parents then one might reasonably argue that the government shouldn’t aim for anything less than “fully advantageous” situations for them. The current reality, however, forces us to admit that a less than fully advantageous situation is still preferable to no situation. Tax laws belong to Caesar. The way we treat orphans belongs to God. Arguing against SSM and tax laws is fine but leave orphans out of it. Better yet take a vacation from SSM and donate some time, money and prayer to the children God exhorts us to care for – James 1:27. Can’t help but think that caring about Cambridge’s tax laws are a small part of the pollution James mentions.
July 13th, 2011 | 6:03 am
This isn’t really about equal pay for equal work
People don’t work for their gross pay but their take home pay. If person A works for $3000 a month, then he will demand $3300 a month if complicated tax code provisions make it so that he must be paid $3300 to clear $3000.
Down with DOMA!” press release and saved your taxpayers the extra…
Well now that we are on the subject, Down with DOMA. Let the states decide marriage. In no other area does the Federal gov’t presume to override the state’s calls on marriages.
Now some irate unmarried worker is going to call your fairness bluff and make you look like fools.
The response would be to get married. If they marry someone of the different sex they can enjoy the spousal health benefit tax free….or of the same sex the spousal health benefit is ‘essentially tax free’ as the pay will be grossed up to compensate for the taxes.
Brian
Um, guy, then why are you pushing for homosexuals to make MORE for the same job? Are you really incapable of holding a coherent thought long enough to utter a complete sentence?
They aren’t. The gay couple makes exactly what the straight couple makes doing the same job.
pentamom
Now stop and think about what the general reaction to any organization that paid a husband with children more than a single, childless woman would be paid for comparable work with comparable credentials and experience.
It would be outrage, of course. But here the pay is the same. The ‘spousal benefit’ doesn’t directly impact your pay….in fact, given two equally paid position the person that opts for the ‘spousal benefit’ will take home less money than the person who doesn’t.
What you’re going is adding the ‘value’ of the policy to the employees pay rather than simply adding the share that the employees themselves pay directly out of their paycheck. This doesn’t really hold up very well if you scrutinize it too much. For example, by this reasoning what about employees who opt for ‘family coverage’ which is husband, wife and kids? You, being a penta-mom, are getting 5 times as many kids covered as an employee who only has one kid! That means you’re technically being paid more than someone whose exactly equal to you or your husband with the only difference being how many kids they have!
But this way of thinking about things runs into problems. Many large employers aren’t technically paying for health coverage. When you work for a large company and have insurance from, say, Blue Cross, what often happens is that the large company is simply paying all the health costs of their employees and are using Blue Cross to manage the accounting (plus their negotiating skills and expertise to keep costs down). So one way of looking at it is to add up the total cost of coverage and divide by the employees who opt for coverage and say that’s the ‘cost per employee’….but you could also say what is the true cost each person is adding by his or her health expenses in a given year. From that perspective, your 5 kids may have few health costs this year but the person with 1 kid may burn through $50,000 of medical treatments. If you’re going to add the non-employee cost of health coverage to employee pay…..well you can argue that person with 1 kid is getting paid $50K more than you!
Solutions here are:
1. Propose some radical health reform that breaks health coverage from employment. Since something like 50% of the population gets covered thru work and likes it that way you’re going to have a tough time.
2. Just accept that the non-employee share of health is a company expense, not directly employee pay and leave it alone.
Martial Artist
A question for anyone commenting here: What justifies the state’s interest in providing income tax preferences for married individuals?…children
OK are children also the state’s interest in providing tax preferences for corporate jets? Ethanol production? If you’re going to apply a rational basis test to the tax code you’re going to have to chuck nearly 80% of it. The tax code is the result of back and forth political lobbying and accidents caused by the nature of complicated systems.
July 13th, 2011 | 8:38 am
Paying one employee more than such a price means at least one less employee who can be employed.
This is a only possibility, not (as your wording suggests) an implication — especially in an age when management earns several times the salary of ordinary workers, and frequently without any serious justification.
July 13th, 2011 | 10:53 am
Secondarily, paying an employee more because he has a larger family, pace Leo XIII and John Paul II, violates the principal of a “fair wage” …
I had a long discussion about this idea…. I think it suffers from an outdated understanding of the economy where you have some lump of ‘jobs’ and you pass them out to people….
In general pay should be related to their marginal product….how much does the worker add to bottom line. A better model for the large family vs small family worker IMO is to supplement income for those with large families. So two Starbucks workers may make $9 an hour but if one guy has five kids he qualifies for all types of tax credits which supplement his income. So from the point of view of Starbucks, the guy with 5 kids doesn’t cost any more to employ than the guy with no kids. This is an advantage since the alternative is to create an incentive for Starbucks and other employers to discriminate against hiring the guy with 5 kids….or discourage its present workers from having more kids. Do we really want employers to be incorporating such motives into the employer-employee relationship?
July 13th, 2011 | 9:36 pm
Arguing against SSM and tax laws is fine but leave orphans out of it. Better yet take a vacation from SSM and donate some time, money and prayer to the children God exhorts us to care for
Even orphans have the right to a mother and a father.
Gays who want to be parents should expect to bear responsibility themselves for how to resolve the problem: if you aren’t providing for the child’s need for both a mother and a father, then you aren’t providing properly for your child.
It is sad when a child loses a mother or father accidentally. It is child abuse when it’s planned that way on purpose.
July 14th, 2011 | 11:28 am
Even orphans have the right to a mother and a father.
They do and they have mothers and fathers. Unless you want to announce the first baby created by cloning or some other type of genetic engineering, there is not a single person alive or who ever lived who did not have a mother and father.
July 15th, 2011 | 7:00 am
Even orphans have the right to a mother and a father.
They do and they have mothers and fathers. Unless you want to announce the first baby created by cloning or some other type of genetic engineering, there is not a single person alive or who ever lived who did not have a mother and father.
Gay marriage relies on forcing children to pretend that mothers and fathers are interchangeable – that having two of one is or can be just as good as having one of each.
Which needs to be classed for what it is – child abuse*.
*child abuse:
(1) it has already been established that forcing a child to believe things that are not true, thus blurring the boundaries of reality, is a form of child abuse.
(2) “parentification” occurs when parents using the children to meet the parents’ needs, thus inverting the normal and healthy relationship where parents take care of children, into one where children are forced to take care of parents. In the short term, such children can seem “more” mature and “more” well-developed – having been forced to “grow up too fast” – but the long term costs are significant.
(3) motherless and fatherless children need to grieve their loss. Being expected to pretend there is no loss hampers the grieving process.
July 15th, 2011 | 12:27 pm
Gay marriage relies on forcing children to pretend that mothers and fathers are interchangeable – that having two of one is or can be just as good as having one of each.
False
No SSM can deny a child his biological mother and father.
As for what is ‘just as good’, that’s a matter of personal opinion. I dread bringing up The Bird Cage again with you but to illustrate the point….no one forced Val to think that being raised by Robin Williams and Nathan Lane was ‘as good’ or ‘better’ than being raised by his biological mother. Most people go through periods where we judge the people who raise us quite harshly (why can’t my parents be like my best friends parents!). But the point remains that Nathan Lane’s character never denied Val his biological mother. His biological mother had every opportunity to assert herself in Val’s life and if she did Val would have had all the advantages of her input. She didn’t. Lane’s character filled a void purposefully left by the woman’s lack of interest in raising her son. Whether or not Lane’s character was ‘as good’ as some hypothetical alternative universe where the mother didn’t fail in her duty is irrelevant. We don’t live in the perfect universe but the actual universe….and biological parents are judged by what they actually do not what an ideal biological parent does.
July 15th, 2011 | 12:36 pm
Regarding your child abuse points…..I’m not seeing any of them as specific to SSM or exlusive to SSM.
For example, its quite easy to see that #2 can happen with any type of parents. “Mommy Dearest” for example, was about a straight parent who nevertheless forced her children to consider her needs above theirs. In the Bird Cage, The Senator was clearly another parent who put his needs over that of his daughter.
Likewise, its easy to imagine that #3 can happen. Imagine a slightly darker Brady Bunch, for example, where the mother insists that her daughters stop thinking of their biological father and insist on treating Mike as their only father of any importance. On the other hand, I can certainly picture the Robin Williams character from The Bird Cage being quite supportive of Val ‘mourning’ his biological mother’s lack of interest in his well being. I don’t really see him trying to force Val to consider Lane’s character as ‘his mother’.
More to the point, this has nothing to do with SSM. Simply being married, straight or not, is not a blank check to do whatever you will to children. There are plenty of married people who quite frankly will never be allowed to raise children because they are simply grossly unfit…yet they are allowed to be married. If you want to make a case that all SS couples are unfit to raise children then go ahead….you’ll have to do better than you’ve done so far with ancedotes, 90% of which come from a single fictional movie you’ve seen. But even if you make that case you haven’t made a case against SSM….only a case against SSM couples adopting kids. So what? DSM couples with all types of problems likewise aren’t allowed to adopt kids either.
If you have a case of child abuse against specific SSM couples or just SS couples….well your obligation isn’t to moan about it here but report it to the proper authorities.
July 15th, 2011 | 3:52 pm
Gay marriage relies on forcing children to pretend that mothers and fathers are interchangeable – that having two of one is or can be just as good as having one of each.
False
No SSM can deny a child his biological mother and father.
Oh yeah? Your false is false.
(“But wait – just saying ‘false’ is not a rebuttal…”…this is true.)
July 15th, 2011 | 3:58 pm
But even if you make that case you haven’t made a case against SSM….only a case against SSM couples adopting kids.
If you are willing to accept that gays and lesbians are entitled to all the benefits of marriage except the procreative benefits – and are willing to acknowledge that people who believe that marriage includes a procreative aspect are entitled to recognize that a difference exists between real marriage vs. what gays have – then we could probably talk from there.
But that’s not what actual gay marriage proponents are doing. They are using the right to marry as a springboard to establish their “right” to found a family – parasitically.
I’d be willing to reconsider my opposition to gay marriage if gays become interested in consenting to recognize the basic truth that part of marriage includes the obligation to not make babies with people outside the marriage.
But gay couples aren’t likely to agree to renewing adultery laws, because gay couples are using marriage to perpetrate fraud.
Like that case I mentioned, Miller vs. Jenkins – and a great many other cases.
The argument that lots of heteros abuse kids, so therefore it’s okay to abuse kids, is really incomprehensible to me. How do you come to that conclusion?
July 16th, 2011 | 1:17 am
If you are willing to accept that gays and lesbians are entitled to all the benefits of marriage except the procreative benefits
Last time I checked marriage does not come with ‘procreative benefits’. ‘Procreative benefits’ come from biology and if you think that simply being unmarried allows you to have procreative sex with a woman without procreation then I think you may be in for a rude awakening at some point in your life.
But gay couples aren’t likely to agree to renewing adultery laws, because gay couples are using marriage to perpetrate fraud.
Who got rid of adultery laws? Not gays but straights. I don’t see any reason why laws should be changed for one type of married couple versus another. I don’t think the state is the really the best place to be regulating adultery…but whether or not it does it should be consistent regulation for all married couples. Why are gays who want to marry to be expected to lobby for harsh ‘adultery laws’ when you do not ask this of non-gay couples who want to marry? But then we have seen you exhibit a pretty dark double standard here ont he other thread where your analysis of The Bird Cage featured you praising a mother who was neglectful and totally indifferent to her own son while chastising Nathan Lane’s character, who while overly emotional, at least tried to be supportive of the son.
Like that case I mentioned, Miller vs. Jenkins – and a great many other cases.
It’s ironic that you speak about fraud since it’s been pointed out several times now that in Miller.v.Jenkins neither party was married and at the time of their relationship both states did not have SSM. If anything it proves the opposite of what you assert, one does not need to have SSM to have cases of same-sex couples having custody of kids and even partners ending up with custody or visitation of non-biological kids. Since this case you cited demonstrates that SSM is not necessary, it actually undercuts your argument that SSM is some elaborate conspiracy by gays to steal straight people’s children.
Oh yeah? Your false is false.
Except it isn’t, I get to do this because you’re dishonest here and I’m not. You may feel like its a double standard but it’s not.
The argument that lots of heteros abuse kids, so therefore it’s okay to abuse kids, is really incomprehensible to me. How do you come to that conclusion?
I didn’t. You made a stupid argument. You imagined that somewhere there’s a gay couple with a kid who isn’t ‘allowing’ the child to mourn the loss of a biological parent (maybe said biological parent died in an accident, maybe said parent is just not interested in their child like Val’s mother in the film etc.). Maybe such a thing exists, likewise I’m sure there’s DSM couples that likewise aren’t ‘allowing’ some mourning process that probably should happen. Saying that such a thing may exist hardly demonstrates that all SSM couples with kids do this just as the fact that some heterosexual couples with kids may abuse them doesn’t demonstrate that all such couples do so. Elementary logic there. Anyway your view of ‘abuse’ here is really, really stretched. When you have parents raising kids who are not boilogical parents, there is going to be a question of how the issue of origins is handled. Many ‘older school’ people I know followed the pattern of denial….refusing to acknowledge to adopted kids they were adopted unless it became absolutely unavoidable and then treating it as a totally taboo subject. Younger people I know take the opposite POV, viewing transparancy from the earliest possible age as the better method. I have my opinions on the subject but I think its defamatory to just toss around a blanket label of ‘abuse’.
They are using the right to marry as a springboard to establish their “right” to found a family – parasitically.
By definition a parasite must feed off the fruits of another’s labor. But this implies that SSM could somehow take children from heterosexual couples….but this is impossible. To use the film again as an example, nothing was taken from Val’s mother. In fact, if Val’s mother had any interest in being a mother it would have been quite difficult for even his biological father to have taken him from her! Val’s mother, it appears, had little interest in reproduction (she isn’t a major character but the impression I get is that while she is heterosexual she had no interest in having other kids having none of her own except for Val which was produced by a brief failed relationship with Robin Williams’s character). In other words no reproduction was parasitical since the reproduction wouldn’t have happened to begin with. Before telling Val his life is horrible because he’s been ‘denied a biological mother’….it might be more important to him to keep in mind he wouldn’t have existed if gay men didn’t exist as his biological mother appears to be a type of person who would have never had a biological child with a heterosexual man in a long term marriage. I’m not saying that ‘sperm donars’ or ‘egg donars’ are giving their children the same thing that children who have two fully committed biological parents are getting….but you should consider such “subpar” bio-parents are not quite having their reproduction stolen by gay couples but are, in fact, probably doing more reproductive activities than they otherwise would have done. You make a case for moral failure, but you are blaming the wrong people. You are blaming gays for the moral failures of straights. But that’s not surprising since your argument is basically one of a double standard….requiring absolute perfection from any hypothetical gay couple while excusing just about anything and everything from everyone else.
July 16th, 2011 | 9:09 am
.but you should consider such “subpar” bio-parents are not quite having their reproduction stolen by gay couples but are, in fact, probably doing more reproductive activities than they otherwise would have done
Children have the right to a relationship with both their biological father and their biological mother.
The ONLY legitimate exception to this is when it is in the child’s best interest to sever that relationship.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/06/offspring-of-sperm-donors-mental-health.html
July 17th, 2011 | 9:08 am
Children have the right to a relationship with both their biological father and their biological mother.
All entitlement rights can always be rephrased as a statement of obligation. For example, saying theres a duty to provide for the hungry.
Likewise the statement you just wrote can be rephrased as saying biological parents have an obligation to provide a relationship to their children.
I see no objection there….but you have made a case not against SSM but againt bioparents neglecting their kids. In other words, your argument is perfect if you want to stand outside the courthouse and protest fertility clinics and sperm banks….not SSM
July 20th, 2011 | 7:23 am
I see no objection there….but you have made a case not against SSM but againt bioparents neglecting their kids. In other words, your argument is perfect if you want to stand outside the courthouse and protest fertility clinics and sperm banks….not SSM
The rules of marriage presume that the person you marry will be the person you make babies with. Changing that rule without prohibiting gay parasitism would be akin to passing a law granting gays the right to deliberately make and break families.
Again: if same sex marriage came accompanied by a change in the rules specifically prohibiting the parasitic forms of reproduction gays require, then we can talk.
Either a law criminalizing adultery or a law recognizing the buying and selling of “shares in one’s child” as human trafficking would do.
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