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January 22, 2004

Appeal filed in same-sex benefits case

The eight-year-old legal battle over Pitt’s denial of health insurance to its employees’ same-sex partners is moving to a higher court.

Yesterday (Jan. 21), lawyers representing seven current and former University employees who say Pitt’s policy discriminates against gays and lesbians filed an appeal to the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.

The Pitt employees are appealing a Jan. 12 ruling by Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Robert C. Gallo that permanently barred the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations from hearing their discrimination complaint.

Gallo’s permanent injunction bars the current/former Pitt employees from proceeding with their claims before the city commission, which Gallo said lacks jurisdiction under law to hear the case.

The workers have been seeking relief under Pittsburgh’s 1990 anti-discrimination ordinance, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation.

In 1997, the city human relations commission found probable cause that Pitt had discriminated. But the commission could not proceed with planned hearings on the case after Pitt filed suit in Common Pleas Court and won a temporary injunction from Gallo.

University officials say Pitt does not discriminate against gays and lesbians and is legally within its rights to use marriage as the determining factor in granting spousal benefits. Opponents of Pitt’s policy point out that homosexuals cannot legally marry in Pennsylvania.

Gallo, both in his recent ruling and his earlier temporary injunction, sided with the University.

In the four-page opinion he issued Jan. 12, Gallo wrote that Pitt has no legal obligation, under the city’s 1990 anti-discrimination ordinance or otherwise, “to offer [a] medical insurance benefit under its health insurance program to the domestic partners of its employees.”

Even if the city’s human relations commission were to find that Pitt’s health benefits policy is discriminatory, Gallo concluded, the commission would lack the power to impose a remedy. That’s because of a 1999 state law that exempts public universities such as Pitt from local ordinances that would force them to offer spousal health benefits to employees’ same-sex partners.

Pitt’s critics accused the University and state lawmakers of colluding to get the law passed expressly to block Pittsburgh’s human relations commission from hearing the discrimination claim against Pitt — a charge that University officials deny.

Pitt officials welcomed Gallo’s Jan. 12 ruling with the following statement: “Although the University of Pittsburgh always maintained that litigation was not the proper forum to settle the issue of domestic partner health insurance benefits, we are nevertheless pleased that the court agrees with our legal positions that the city ordinance never required us to offer the benefits and that using marriage as a basis for offering the benefits is not discriminatory.”

Chris Biancheria, one of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorneys representing the current/former Pitt employees, said Gallo’s ruling “was not exactly a complete surprise. We’d had some indication of the judge’s thinking from the preliminary injunction he’d ordered a while back. But nonetheless, we had good arguments and we’d held out some hope, so it was definitely disappointing.

“The 1999 state law on which Judge Gallo rested his decision is flagrantly unconstitutional,” Biancheria maintained. “It was passed, apparently as a favor to Pitt, without following [constitutional] procedures. The judge completely overlooks that in his opinion. We also think he was in error in forbidding the city’s human relations commission from holding any more hearings on this case. It deprives our clients of the chance to present further evidence” that Pitt’s benefits policy discriminates.

The upcoming Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania process in the Pitt same-sex benefits case “could go on for a year, give or take a few months, before that court rules on our appeal,” Biancheria estimated.

Bruce L. Venarde, one of the plaintiffs seeking to force Pitt to offer same-sex health benefits, said: “I’m very sad and very angry at the extraordinary lengths to which Pitt has gone to repeatedly block the civil rights law, to the extent that we cannot even get a hearing on a civil rights complaint. This is a shameful thing.”

Venarde, a Pitt associate professor of history and associate chairperson of the history department, noted that a growing number of U.S. corporations — along with 45 of Pitt’s 60 fellow members of the Association of American Universities — offer health benefits to their employees’ same-sex partners. “So, we’re behind such ‘flamingly liberal institutions’ as the University of Colorado and Purdue,” he said.

Under a deal reached in May 2001, Pitt pledged to consider extending same-sex health benefits; in return, Venarde and his fellow plaintiffs suspended their lawsuit. After 10 months of study, a committee of Pitt faculty, staff, students, administrators and trustees concluded in spring 2002 that, while the University eventually should extend the benefits “it would not be prudent” to do so in the current political climate. Harrisburg lawmakers had threatened to cut off Pitt’s state funding if the University began offering health insurance to employees’ gay and lesbian partners.

To Venarde, the committee’s conclusion didn’t ring true. “If Pitt had wanted to do it, they could have said to the legislature, years ago, ‘We didn’t have any choice, because it’s the law,’ instead of trying to undermine the law, and spending outrageous amounts of money doing it.

“The committee said Pitt should offer these benefits eventually, just not now. Well, we’re tired of waiting and we’re not going to let this go.”

Another plaintiff, Rae Anne Lockard, said: “I think that because this hasn’t been in the news for many months until [Gallo’s latest decision], many people in this city and on this campus thought that Pitt began to offer these benefits a while ago, when other institutions started doing it. We need to get the word out that this cause continues to be fought.

“Carnegie Institute, Carnegie-Mellon, even Mellon Bank before they changed their name offer these benefits,” said Lockard, head librarian at the Frick Fine Arts Library. “Pitt is surrounded and, frankly, they deserve to be singled out for this refusal to grant these benefits.

“My partner is unemployed due to a disability, so I’m the bread-winner for us and our three children. My health care is covered, but she requires medications that amount to over $500 a month above what she’s covered for by Medicare.

“I have given Pitt a lot of my life, working here over 18 years, and I’ve brought Pitt national renown through my job with such things as coordinating national conferences here, and yet I have to endure this continual slap in the face. It is really beyond me why Pitt would continue to do this.”

—Bruce Steele and Peter Hart


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