The Inclusion Committee submissions advocating domestic partner benefits completely fail to mention nearly all the major benefits of such benefits to the county. The bottom line is there is a fundamental reason why gays, on average, make the best employees and that reason is very low average fertility. With less than a third of the fertility of heterosexual employees, gay employees have a proportionally low utilization of parental leave benefits, childcare and child medical benefits, mommy hours, and childcare related employee fatigue. They save neighboring taxpayers immensely on school taxes as they prevent urban sprawl and childcare related traffic, with all it's associated pollution.
As clean and thriving, low fertility communities like San Francisco, Key West, and Provincetown Massachusetts exemplify, as compared to high fertility Detroit, gays are not just any minority, they are absolutely essential to a sustainable community both economically and environmentally. They are neighbors upon whom we as a community are absolutely dependent.
There is only one possible policy that is potentially superior to domestic partner benefits, and that would be equal treatment of single and childless employees, including single gays, through the complete elimination of spousal and dependent benefits and their replacement with proportionately higher pay on a 0 net expense basis. However, domestic partner benefits remain vastly superior to current policy.
However, The "respectful workplace policy" infringes on protected free speech to such an extent that I believe it will prevent essential communication with potentially costly, damaging, and unsafe results. For example, if rapid safety warnings must be respectful, many simply will not take place.
-Alan Ditmore, Leicester, NC

http://www.buncombecounty.org/Governing/Commi... 0319/20130319.htm
http://www.change.org/petitions/asheville-lgb...

PS I find it interesting to note that after a hundred years of Democratic hegemony, during which nobody could bother with gay rights, It took a Republican challenge including nearly half the board to motivate Democrats to finally stop taking minorities for granted.