University of Nebraska-Lincoln Approves Health Benefits to Same-Sex Couples

Partner benefits get group's OK
BY RAY PARKER

Recognizing gay couples for the first time, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Academic Senate approved a resolution Tuesday granting health benefits to same-sex domestic partners.
"It's a discrimination issue ... by not providing health benefits to gays and lesbians, there's discrimination," senate member and English professor Gerry Brookes said of the resolution, which passed 26-12 with three members abstaining.
The resolution urges the universitywide benefits committee to grant same-sex domestic partners of faculty members the same health and insurance benefits that spouses of heterosexual faculty members receive.
Any move to extend benefits at UNL will ultimately require action by the Board of Regents.
UNL Chancellor James Moeser said Tuesday that extending benefits to gay partners was "simple human rights and fairness" and is "the right thing to do." However, he said, his discussions with the Board of Regents suggest members are not politically supportive. "They are not prepared to make this change," Moeser said.
Two domestic-partner resolutions -- which didn't specifically address gay couples -- were approved by the Academic Senate in 1996 and 1998 but tabled by the benefits committee.
Gail Latta, Academic Senate president, said Tuesday's vote was different from previous action.
"It was more broadly defined before and could have included a variety of domestic combinations," she said. "Not that those arrangements can't be addressed but because it's a discrimination issue, we addressed it this way." Said George Wolf, associate professor of English: "The benefits committee will now have to deal with it specifically instead of evading the issue." Tuesday's vote follows last month's landmark decision by Vermont's House of Representatives, which approved a bill creating "civil unions" giving gay and lesbian couples virtually all the benefits of marriage. For members of civil unions, the bill lists two dozen areas in which the law would consider their roles to be just like those of spouses.
It's expected that other states will not have to recognize the legal status of Vermont's civil unions.