Hooray for WKU - 4th KY University Extends Domestic Partner Benefits

Now here's a "good friday" event I can celebrate:

Western Kentucky University officials announced Friday that the school will begin offering health insurance to qualifying dependents — including domestic partners — of its employees, starting next year.

WKU is the fourth public university in Kentucky to extend health benefits to its employees’ domestic partners in the past several years.

The three other institutions are the University of Louisville, University of Kentucky and Northern Kentucky University. U of L and UK began offering domestic-partner benefits to employees in 2007 and NKU in 2008.

Some private colleges, including Berea and Centre, also offer domestic-partner benefits to their employees.

Tony Glisson, WKU’s director of human resources, sent an e-mail to faculty and staff on Friday morning, announcing the school’s Employee Benefits Advisory Committee approved a motion to extend health coverage to qualifying “other dependents” who live with employees. The change would encompass same and opposite sex partners, Glisson said in an interview.

While UL, UK and NKU are located in the metropolitan areas of Louisville, Lexington and Northern Kentucky/Cincinnati respectively, Western graces Bowling Green, a small liberal enclave in the state's deeply conservative southern tier.

This is a Big Fucking Deal.

The four holdouts among Kentucky's eight state universities are now Murray in the far western corner next to Missouri (yes, THAT Murray), Eastern and Morehead in the eastern mountains, and Kentucky State in Frankfort.

I'll predict that Eastern will be next, if only because it has a longstanding rivalry with Western. Then Murray because of its new national profile and Morehead because it has an inferiority complex. Kentucky State will hold out the longest, refecting the deep social conservativism of the historically black college.

But it's inevitable now. If you want the best faculty and the top students, you've got to join the 21st century.

Get Married or Else

Never underestimate the ability of wingnuts to come up with new ways to punish those who don't fit the Ozzie and Harriet mold.

Here in Kentucky, an attempt by the University of Louisville to follow the Fortune 500's lead in offering benefits that attract top-quality employees had the repugs setting a new low in hate legislation.

Last year U of L began offering employees the option of buying health insurance for "domestic partners."

The "religious" freaks naturally - well, freaked. "Slippery slope!" they screamed. "Gay marriage!" "Mandatory sodomy for 5-year-olds!"

Never mind that the program applied to any domestic partner - heterosexual or homosexual. Never mind that the benefits would be purchased by the employee at no cost to the university or the taxpayers of Kentucky. It was a small step toward dragging Kentucky into the 21st century. It had to be stopped.

So the republicans proposed legislation banning domestic partnership benefits. But it was written in their usual force-everyone-on-earth-to-do-things-our-way style. It would have banned benefits being offered to anyone other than a spouse or children. No benefits for heterosexual live-ins. No benefits for indigent parents. No benefits for orphaned nieces and nephews, or abandoned grandchildren. No benefits, no how, no way.

Get married or else.

The Democrats in the House managed to beat it back, but barely. Two of the Democrats on the House Health and Welfare Committee - Bob Damron of Nicholasville and James Spencer of Prestonsburg - voted in favor of the bill.
It's too bad - Damron is a good guy on a lot of things, but when it comes to anything remotely smacking of sex, he releases his Inner Puritan.

Seriously, somebody needs to get these idiots laid.