Ohio Rep. Tom Brinkman
Equal work for equal pay – but heavens, no, not if you're gay.
That's what Ohio Representative Tom Brinkman, Jr. (R-Hamilton County) would write if he were a college student scrawling bad poetry in the margins of his notebooks.
Unfortunately, he's an Ohio lawmaker who is suing Miami University (yes, that's in Ohio) to take away domestic partner benefits from gay and lesbian employees because he says they violate Ohio's anti-gay marriage amendment.
Brinkman and his attorney David Langdon are singing the same song we're hearing the anti-gay forces sing to gays in Michigan: first we ban your right to marry, then we take away your health insurance.
And just like the proponents of the marriage amendment in Michigan, Ohio's amendment supporters claimed that the issue was just about marriage, not about taking away benefits.
Last year Langdon, who wrote Ohio's extremely regressive amendment, said it wouldn't impact public universities offering DP benefits.
Now he's saying he was misunderstood, and he isn't saying it with flowers.
The Associated Press puts it this way: "Langdon said his argument last fall was that existing union contracts conferring the benefits would not be rescinded. Because Miami's faculty didn't get the benefits through a labor agreement, they aren't protected."
See? He hasn't changed positions. He and other amendment proponents just knew it would be a lot harder, not to mention politically unpopular, to yank benefits included in union contracts. All the other suckers were fair game all along.
Brinkman, who has two kids attending Miami University, wants to make sure the tuition dollars he shells out aren't given to the sodomites, and he's enlisted the help of the notoriously anti-gay Alliance Defense Fund.
As for the partners of gay and lesbian university employees who could lose their health insurance: hey, f–k them.
"[They should] go get a job that gives them benefits. They don't have a ball and chain around them," http://365Gay.com quoted Brinkman as saying.
As anyone who has ever needed or lost a job that offered benefits knows, it's really not a big deal. Jobs with good benefits abound in today's economy, especially in Michigan and Ohio. Why, you could get a job at Delphi, or GM, or… oh, wait a minute…
That universities offering DP benefits do so to make themselves competitive with other schools to attract the best faculty and staff – the very people who make or break the educational experience of students attending those schools – is apparently lost on Brinkman. But then, if he wanted homos teaching his kids, he wouldn't send them to college, he'd send them to San Francisco.
Send Brinkman an essay about what you think of his lawsuit, using proper citation and one inch margins. Send it to 77 S. High St. 11th Floor; Columbus, OH, 43215-6111, email [email protected] or read it over the phone at 614-644-6886.
