Friends WIth Benefits

Thursday's Washington Post contained comprehensive coverage, three stories no less, of Barack Obama's presidential memorandum that decrees in these dark days of recession new "benefits to partners of federal workers." But don't worry, your scarce hard-earned tax dollars won't go to all domestic lovers. Just homosexual ones.

The memorandum "does not cover domestic heterosexual partners,"reports the Post. And who largely drafted the memorandum? John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, who is "the highest-ranking openly gay person in the administration."

Heterosexual sinners need to hire better lobbyists, or hope that Obama soon finds in his impressively massive heart a new and richer understanding of their attempts at semi-committed love.

Again I ask: Are we witnessing the quiet spread of heterophobia? Why should a Carrie Prejean not enjoy the ample protections of Obama's hate-crime laws? Why should the girlfriends of fornicating federal workers not receive, as homosexuals now do, "long-term-care insurance benefits" for their short-term relationships?

As I don't need to tell you, this president is deeply committed to "competitiveness" and released his memorandum with the efficiency of the federal government at the very top of his mind: "Extending available benefits will help the Federal Government compete with the private sector to recruit and retain the best and the brightest employees." But doesn't he see that by denying benefits to the heterosexually shacked-up he is risking the loss of their abundant talents too?

This nation cannot afford to lose a single one of the federal government's 2 million civil servants. Remember how impossible life became after Bill Clinton shut the federal government down due to Newt Gingrich's recalcitrance and sent, I'm sorry to use this cruel term but it was the state-of-the-art phrase at the time, "unessential workers" home? No one wants to go through that again.

What, you may be wondering, are the benefits in Wednesday's memorandum that will make the federal government a little more brisk? One apparently is that gay federal workers can now take time off to care for "children not related by blood or adoption."

Say a child is struggling with "LGBT" issues of one kind or another; that federal worker could now take the afternoon off and sooth the youngster by reading with him or her President Obama's proclamation, addressed in part to "LGBT" youth, that declared June "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month."

Gay activists seemed a little surly after Obama went to the trouble of signing an order that elevates them and snubs heterosexuals. What gives? Unlike Republican pols, who find the pro-lifers to whom they have to hurl bones from time to time very boring and tiresome, Obama actually likes and agrees with his ideological base. He has made it clear to gay activists, via his wife, that his nominal opposition to gay marriage is political, not philosophical, and that once the coast is clear he will endorse it in every state.

Why the impatience? Well, at least Candy Holmes has things in perspective. A veteran of the Government Accountability Office, shetold the Post that the words "hopeful" and "excited" describe her mood. She wants "to believe this is the beginning of equality."

Holmes and her lesbian partner, by the way, "are both ordained clergy with the Metropolitan Community Church," so perhaps in the near future they will have a little more time for troubled youth and some freed-up money, otherwise used on niggling insurance plans, for more affirming purchases, such as the memoirs of Milwaukee Archbishop Emeritus Rembert Weakland.