I’ve talked a lot about the intersection of business and commerce with policy and politics (in fact, it was the subject of my first post). So, I perked up my ears when I heard that a national political leader was doing the same thing. Well, sort of…okay, not really.
As you may have read in the past few days, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele in a speech on Saturday said that legalization of gay marriage would hurt small businesses because it would be too expensive. His remarks were picked up by the Associated Press, covered on CNN and MSNBC and repeated by numerous LGBT Web sites and blogs including The Advocate, Towleroad, Americablog, Queerty and Pam’s House Blend.
There are a lot of things to be said about the impact of equal marriage, and most of them have been said over and over again. But the idea that a presumed cost trumps equality is a new one on me. It’s also, unfortunately for Mr. Steele, not backed up by the facts.
More than 500 corporations (big businesses) already offer same-sex partner benefits to their employees – it’s one of the principal measurement questions on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index survey, for example. These companies are not suffering – in fact, many trumpet this benefit as an advantage in their recruiting.
For small businesses, it’s actually the fact that equal marriage is not an option that creates a cost problem. As the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce puts it in an online story about the cost burdens of providing same-sex partner benefits for small businesses, “this burden, of course, stems from the fact that most same-sex couples don't have access to civil marriage, creating a parallel universe of complex paperwork for employers who offer domestic partner benefits in their effort to attract and retain workers.”
I’m no insurance (or finance) expert, but it seems to me that the opposite of what Mr. Steele said is true. If we had equal marriage laws at the federal level, it would be much easier for all concerned: insurance companies already provide coverage to married couples, so the expanded definition would also include same-sex couples. Small businesses would have a new benefit to offer employees without the burden of separate but not equal paperwork.
And, as Keith Olbermann pointed out on his MSNBC show last night, same sex weddings have the potential to add more than $16 billion into the economy each year, much of that directed at local businesses that would benefit from more people conducting more weddings.
Strategic communications is about delivering the right message to the right audience in the right way. Mr. Steele's attempt was all wrong.
As a Republican friend pointed out to me: so, why then, would he bring up this argument? Good question.
Side note: Our friends at the aforementioned National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce have kindly invited me to attend Out for Business, their annual conference, held this year in Seattle (at the end of the month). I’m looking forward to the opportunity to hear from and learn from business leaders active in the community. I’ll follow-up about the conference in a future post.
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