Usually, the ignorance exposed by the “down home values” crowd is pretty predictable, and I’m able to shrug it off as I go about my day. That is, until I learned about the newest Republican onslaught against equality and fairness, this time in the form of House bills 4770 and 4771.

These bills would ban public and governmental bodies — such as MSU — from offering their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender employees domestic partnership benefits, most notably health care, and would furthermore bar public employees from including or asking for such benefits as part of a collective bargaining process.
These bills have made their way out of their house committee, passed a house vote and have now moved over to the Senate were they wait in the Senate Reforms, Restructuring and Reinventing Committee.

As many will remember, a divisive 2004 ballot initiative outlawed both gay marriage and all over legally recognized civil unions or domestic partnerships. Since then, the issue of providing gay families, where one or more spouse is a public employee, health care benefits has been the subject of legal maneuvering in and outside Michigan courts.

Since 2004, MSU (and many other colleges and universities in Michigan) still have been able to provide gay faculty and staff and their families with health care and other fringe benefits under what they have termed an Other Eligible/Qualified Individual category of eligibility. Although with this latest legislative attack on gay public employees benefits, many fear that legal maneuvering previously possible for state schools would be no longer.

Nevertheless, some remain optimistic. For example, Equality Michigan has quoted Mike Boulus, executive director of the President’s Council of State Universities in Michigan, as saying that some public schools might be able to legally argue HB 4779 and 4771 violate Michigan Universities rights to autonomy and self-governance as afforded to them in Article 8 of the Michigan State Constitution.

It’s great to see some already preparing for this latest attack on our professors and university support staff, but for others not employed in higher education, there seems to be no legal remedy to safeguard their families’ health care insurance if this pair of bills becomes law.

And these newest efforts to stave off the latest legislative gay bashing certainly begs the question: Who wakes up in the morning plotting the newest way to take away someone’s health care, or to destroy someone’s family? What kind of person does it take to do something so despicable?

And with roughly 35 sponsors to each piece of legislation, exactly what sort of ‘family values’ does such legislation promote?
Even if, by some creative legal action MSU and other schools are able to protect the health care and other fringe benefits of their gay employees, there is little luck of the same protection being afforded to other gay public employees outside of academia.

Rather than simply being about health care or collective bargaining, this pair of bills effectively aims to demean and devalue LGBT professors, support staff and others gay public employees. In its literal implementation, it seeks to destroy gay families by taking away health care for public employee’s partners and their children and drive gay families out of the state.

In a time when so many of us are so preoccupied with job creation, does it really make sense to make our state so inhospitable to so many qualified workers that we inevitably lose jobs and deincentivize qualified applicants into coming to Michigan?
Please reach out to your state senators, particularly if they are on the Senate Reforms, Restructuring and Reinventing Committee and ask them to not only vote “no” on this discriminatory and hateful pair of bills but to also speak out and encourage others to do so as well.

To find your senator or to find more information on these bills, go to senate.mi.gov and legislature.mi.gov.

Mitch Goldsmith is a State News guest columnist and social relations and policy, women’s and gender studies senior. Reach him at goldsm40@msu.edu.