Expand the "Family" and Medical Leave Act: Step One

Happy Unmarried and Single Americans Week! This seven-day extravaganza honors singledom as a viable and respectable lifestyle. Although some pundits and dating websites try to co-opt the holiday into another excuse to "fix" singles by turning them into halves of couples, that was never the original purpose. So in honor of USA week, let's take on the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

FMLA privileges the conjugal heterosexual marital relationship, at the expense of not only gays but all unmarried and single people. If Martians read the Act, they would think that the only people who get sick in America are husbands, wives, children, and parents, because these are the people FMLA allows workers time off to care for, without risking their jobs.  (Here's what happens when non-nuclear loved ones fall ill.)

At the least, the FMLA should mirror the U.S. federal government's "care time," which says employees can leave their jobs temporarily to care for "any individual related by blood or affinity whose close association with the employee is the equivalent of a family relationship.”

After the 111th Congress starts in January 2011, you can join the Alternatives to Marriage Project (AtMP) in petitioning our lawmakers to expand FMLA. For now, AtMP asks readers to share your experiences dealing with FMLA or similar state-sponsored leave programs.

AtMP will use your FMLA stories to bolster their effort to push FMLA-amending bills through Congress. Two important acts have been stuck in House committees since April 2009: The Family and Medical Leave Inclusion Act (FMLIA) and the Family Leave Insurance Act (FLIA).  FMLIA would "permit leave to care for a same-sex spouse, domestic partner, parent-in-law, adult child, sibling, or grandparent who has a serious health condition." FLIA would provide paid leave to the people mentioned above (FMLA leave is unpaid).

Please note that although AtMP is of course interested your stories of same-sex domestic partnership discrimination in FMLA, they're particularly looking for stories about unmarried people and the Act. Let me preempt some typical protests that this request may raise:  Of course singles -- heterosexuals in particular -- don't experience the scathing bigotry that gays do. But singlism is still a problem, especially in government policies. AtMP and many other advocates believe that by challenging the insidious, mystical privileging of marriage, and by insisting on equal benefits regardless of relationship status, we remove much of the imbalance of rights that means gay couples need to marry in order to deal with certain life logistics, such as illness or property transfer. (Wanting to marry, to represent a personal commitment to each other, is another issue. That should be allowed for all sexual orientations, but divorced from any state-sanctioned rights.)

Although the bills discussed above still imposes a nuclear family nexus on beneficiaries, they're steps forward toward more inclusive definition of family that will help make a wider range of "alternative" lifestyles less alternative -- that is, less marginalized.

Photo credit: Arm Sling Girl 001