SPEAKING OUT
Hope for Gay and Lesbian Foreign Service Employees
BY STEVEN GIEGERICH
Most readers are well aware
of the glaring inequities that
Foreign Service employees
with same-sex partners face throughout their careers. Several AFSA members have written eloquent Speaking
Out columns in recent years highlighting the many privileges and benefits
currently denied them. I am thinking
particularly of USAID FSO Ajit Joshi
(November 2004) and Ambassador
Michael Guest (March 2008), who resigned from the Foreign Service in
protest of the State Department’s refusal to address such concerns.
State did take a few baby steps toward improving conditions under the
previous administration, granting the
same-sex partners of FS personnel access to the Security Overseas Seminar
and the Rosetta Stone online language
library, as well as (on a space-available
basis) the Foreign Service Institute’s
distance-learning language courses,
FAST language instruction and secu-rity-related workshops.
But even those paltry achievements
came about largely due to a February
2008 letter from four members of
Congress — Rep. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., Howard Berman, D-Calif., Gary
Ackerman, D-N.Y. and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. — urging those and
other “common-sense policy changes,”
such as inclusion in travel orders;
broader access to training; emergency
evacuation and medevac from post
These issues have
important
implications for the
entire Foreign Service
— not just those
directly affected by
discrimination.
when necessary; access to post health
units; and visa support, both for partners joining Foreign Service personnel
overseas and for non-U.S. citizen partners accompanying them on domestic
assignments.
The representatives specifically
mentioned that they believed that
none of those proposals were contrary
to the letter or spirit of the Defense of
Marriage Act, legislation passed during
the 1990s to prevent the federal government from conferring any recognition on same-sex marriages.
The April 2008 response from Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs Jeffrey Bergner asserted
that the State Department treats
“same-sex and opposite-sex unmarried
partners of U.S. government employees stationed abroad in an equivalent
manner.” Um, we knew that, and that
wasn’t the point. The representatives’
follow-up letter called this an “unsatis-
factory response” and asked once again
for Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice’s leadership on this issue, but
never got a meaningful reply.
All these issues have important economic, quality-of-life and career implications for a significant segment of the
Foreign Service corps — and should
concern everyone. Inaction is not only
unfair, but foolish, leaving the federal
government more and more out of
tune with private-sector practices.
Fifty-six percent of Fortune 500 companies already provide domestic partner benefits to their employees,
according to data the Human Rights
Campaign has compiled.
The Practical Impact
of Inequality
Consider my own experience.
Daniel, my foreign partner of six years,
has stayed with me through an unaccompanied tour followed by three
overseas transfers. We’ve had to pay
his way to each post ourselves, and he
was almost denied boarding on one occasion for not possessing a round-trip
ticket. He is ineligible for home leave,
R&R, elder care, emergency visitation,
evacuation, etc.
Each time we move, Daniel has to
cancel his local health insurance coverage, then find an appropriate local
provider at our next posting (fully self-funded, of course). This arrangement
is extremely expensive, often provides
