Would same-sex marriage hurt small businesses?
In a speech on Saturday, Michael Steele, the Republican National Committee Chair said that legalization of gay marriage would hurt small businesses because it would be too expensive.
As my friend, Ben Finzel at Fleishman-Hillard points out on the Out Front Blog, there’s now a small business version to scapegoating marriage:
There are a lot of things to be said about the impact of equal marriage, and most of them have been said over and over again. But the idea that a presumed cost trumps equality is a new one on me. It’s also, unfortunately for Mr. Steele, not backed up by the facts.
For small businesses, it’s actually the fact that equal marriage is not an option that creates a cost problem. As the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce puts it in an online story about the cost burdens of providing same-sex partner benefits for small businesses, ‘œthis burden, of course, stems from the fact that most same-sex couples don’t have access to civil marriage, creating a parallel universe of complex paperwork for employers who offer domestic partner benefits in their effort to attract and retain workers.’
I’m no insurance (or finance) expert, but it seems to me that the opposite of what Mr. Steele said is true. If we had equal marriage laws at the federal level, it would be much easier for all concerned: insurance companies already provide coverage to married couples, so the expanded definition would also include same-sex couples. Small businesses would have a new benefit to offer employees without the burden of separate but not equal paperwork.
A presumed cost trumps equality… what will Republicans think of next?
Call me crazy here, but isn’t the cost the same because now a business is covering partner a and another company partner b. If you could get marriage benefits then business 1 would carry partner a and b but then business 2 has no cost. So, on a macro level it is a wash. Only place it would even add people to the pool of coverage is for same-sex partners who have one of the couple out of work or choosing to be a full time parent. Such a shame no one taught these folks basic math 😉
There are just so many problems with this argument, it’s really hard to know where to begin.
OMG – This argument is just ludicrous.
only the homophobic ones
John Aravosis said it best:
It is true that when a state legalizes gay marriage, it does create work for each employer in the state. The HR department now has to do paperwork for employees who are Federally single, but married at the Sate level.
I am married and live and work in Massachusetts.
I have different withholding for State and Federal taxes.
The software for our dental coverage does not allow you to enter a same-sex partner, so when I sign up my partner for coverage, it gets noted (I’m guessing on a post-it in the office) and is manually entered into the coverage database; however it is not stored. Every two weeks the database is automatically “refreshed,” overwriting the current list of those covered, and deleting my partner’s name. When she goes to the dentist, her insurance is always denied (on the first try). I call HR and they manually enter her name and process the claim. And her name gets overwritten the next time the database is refreshed. And the process repeats.
These are just two examples of the additional hassles we encounter as dual-status citizens. I could list several more.
It would be so much easier if our marriages were also recognized federally.
Helen: Hear, hear.