A Pro-family, Pro-gay Gop
Earlier this week, I wrote that the GOP needs to move beyond gay marriage.
Instead, it should focus its energies on developing conservative policies that will appeal to homosexual citizens. Such efforts are not just critical if Republicans hope to compete for gay voters. They are critical if Republicans hope to compete for the young, educated, and suburban voters who believe that the GOP is hostile to their gay friends and family.
Well, having promoted these alternative policies, I might as well take a crack at a few.
Assuming that there is some genetic component to homosexuality, it is not science fiction to believe that parents will one day be able to do pre-natal testing for sexual orientation. Bill McGurn’s Wall Street Journal profile of the group GOProud noted that one Maine state legislator introduced a bill that would prohibit abortion if genetic testing had determined an unborn child was gay.
Since their victories on Partial-Birth Abortion, Congressional Republicans have been searching for the next coalition-cutting abortion issue. How can they promote a pro-life agenda, while forcing Democrats to choose between pro-choice extremism and the majority of voters? Legislation prohibiting abortion post-viability if the motivation for the abortion is based on a child’s race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disability would seem to fit that bill.
On the health care front, there are less controversial measures that conservatives could support without damaging their commitment to traditional marriage.
For example, they should co-sponsor something like the Tax Equity for Domestic Partner and Health Plan Beneficiaries Act. As the debate over health care reform has demonstrated, the tax code promotes employer-provided health coverage in large measure by excluding from income the value of a health care policy provided to employees. As corporate America has extended health benefits to domestic partners, however, an inequity has emerged in the tax code. The share of employer-provided health care premiums going to an employee’s spouse is excludable from the employee’s income. The same is not true for an employee’s domestic partner, however. For a gay employee, the value of his partner’s health coverage is included as phantom income, and the employee must pay taxes on it.
Proudly supporting this legislation, or something like it, need not undermine the GOP’s commitment to traditional marriage. The law would be a value-neutral exclusion of the employer’s share of premiums from income. Yet, when this bill was introduced in the 110th Congress by Senator Gordon Smith, not one Republican Senator joined him in co-sponsoring the legislation.
Similarly, homosexuals are treated inequitably in the operation of Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), even though the individual actually owns that account and makes his own contributions to it.
Conservatives should own this issue.
Under current law, a gay employee who is eligible for domestic partner benefits, could enroll in an HSA-eligible high deductible family plan. Having enrolled in that family plan, he would be eligible for a tax deductible contribution to his HSA, much larger than that available to a person with individual coverage. Yet even though he is eligible to contribute a larger amount to his HSA, and even though his partner is covered under the health plan, his partner’s use of the HSA for ordinary medical care would not qualify as a tax-deductible health related expense.
Republicans should support a change to this treatment of HSAs as a matter of fairness. They should support it on the grounds of sound health care policy. And they should support it because it would force Congressional Democrats to choose between their irrational hostility toward HSAs and gay citizens who seek freedom and choice in their health care.
As I have noted previously, evolving attitudes toward homosexuality present serious challenges for Republicans. But there are opportunities for the GOP to promote conservative policies that will resonate with the vast majority of American voters.
The only thing standing in the way of Republicans advancing these policies is a fear that a few loud religious conservatives will object.
God willing.
Republicans sticking by popular democratically established marriage policies, lightly challenging religious conservatives, and promoting mainstream conservative policies that the gay community would support over the objections of Congressional Democrats?
Not to get carried away, but this is how realignments happen.