ANEW WEB site,DontGivetoUVA .com, has recently attracted news around Grounds for its attempts to "end the discrimination" of homosexual faculty and their life partners. Specifically, it is asking for donations to help provide for health and dental insurance, among other things, for the partners of those gay and lesbian faculty members, while branding the University with such names as "unjust" and "discriminatory".The University should be blamed and ridiculed for spending money on more important things, such as the students or the faculty, than providing benefits for a professor's life partner.
First of all, a question to consider: How long does it take for a gay couple to be "life partners"? One month? A year? Fifty years? I've never gotten a solid answer from the homosexual community, because there is no determined standard on which to base a domestic partnership. Not only that, there are absolutely no legal documents that prove such a union in the state of Virginia. Essentially, the University would be giving money and benefits to professors' boyfriends or girlfriends. This isn't a matter of ignorance or injustice; it's the University protecting itself from giving anything and everything to couples that are completely separate as far as the law is concerned.
The Web site makes the claim that U.Va. is the only university of its tier not to grant such benefits to life partners. That's simply stating that the University has more to lose and less to gain from this agreement than the Ivy Leagues or the schools in California.
Ivy Leagues have two things going for them that allow them to do this: a long history of openly homosexual faculty, and a wealth of rich alumni. Being in a much more conservative area of the country, we lack the favorable reputation of the Ivy Leagues among the homosexual professor community. Most gay professors would take an offer from Cornell or Cal Tech over U.Va. any day, if only for their superior prestige and historically more liberal views. And, with the ever-looming problem of the tightening budget in the University, do you really think we should just be throwing money out the window like this? Frankly, I'd rather have a better ISIS system installed, which benefits everyone.
For those of you who haven't seen the Web site, in the "Why?" section of the Web site there is a quote from Thomas Jefferson -- the sure way to get a U.Va. student's attention: "Laws must go hand and hand with the human mind." Jefferson is quoted, "As that becomes more developed, more enlightened... institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times." That's great, and I heartily agree, but that really doesn't apply here. This Web site, then, is claiming that they are somehow "enlightened." What, then, does that make the rest of us, who believe that there are more important things for the University to spend its money on?
Now, what is so "developed" about giving money to the life partners of faculty while denying funding to a multitude of student functions? And, lest we forget, there actually is no law allowing for gay marriages in Virginia, so this quote really has no value to begin with. State law doesn't support gay unions or any kind of legal bonding between gay couples, so why should U.Va. support such nonexistent unions with money that we can't afford to lose? I guess the majority of Virginians aren't included in with that "enlightened" elitist posse that this Web site is striving to create.
This Web site tries to bring a guilt trip on the viewer, saying that "if you don't give to this charity, you are discriminating against homosexuals everywhere and supporting inequality and injustice!" But, really, where's the injustice? Spouses get health and dental insurance as a special perk of their relationship to a faculty member. But, remember, most of these families have children, sometimes grandchildren, to provide for, which, from what my parents tell me every day, can be very costly. If homosexuals want to blame the University for treating them differently, that's because they are different, and the nature of their relationship with their life partner is different. Don't take money away from the hard working students, because that's really who this university is for.
(Kevin Comer is a first year in the Engineering School.)
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