Christian organizations in the United States and in some other nations face an apparent dilemma regarding the pressure they increasingly experience to provide benefits such as medical insurance to the domestic partners of their employees. In this context, the expression "domestic partner" often refers to an employee’s homosexual companion.

If they provide such benefits, Christian organizations may appear to endorse permanent and exclusive homosexual unions, something many members of the churches intensely oppose. If they don’t, they may appear to the community to be unfair, something that may have unfortunate legal, economic, and public relations consequences.

At first glance, this seems like a lose-lose situation. Thankfully, it isn’t.

One promising alternative would be to remove all explicit and euphemistic references to sexual intimacy from domestic partner policies. This arrangement could authorize each employee to name any person as his or her domestic partner and to purchase the full range of insurance policies (life, medical, property, household items, automotive, and so forth) for this individual and his or her dependents at the reduced prices available through the organization’s group rates. The person the employee names could be a husband, wife, mother, father, friend, sibling, roommate, or any other person, whether or not he or she actually lives with the employee most of the time.

The person the employee names as his or her domestic partner could also be a homosexual companion. This is not something about which the organization would need to know or make an issue in this context, however. Such questions about the employee’s personal life would not be pertinent to purchasing these insurance policies at reduced prices, though they would remain relevant in other respects. Benefits for the employee himself or herself could remain as they now are.

This way of doing things would have several advantages. One is that it would obviate the need to define "sexual intimacy," whether heterosexual or homosexual, in a way both pertinent to this set of issues and helpful, a task that can be difficult. Another is that it would preclude the need to verify that an employee’s sexual life is precisely as he or she describes it. This is almost impossible to do without invasions of privacy that seem inappropriate both for those who must ask the questions and those who must answer them.

A third advantage of removing references to sexual matters from domestic partner policies is that this approach would treat household companions who are not sexually intimate in the same way that it treats those who are, an improvement in fairness. Why should an employee who lives with someone else without being physically intimate receive different employee benefits than does an employee who lives with another person in a sexual way, for instance?

A fourth advantage is that this approach would treat employees who live alone and are celibate the same way it treats those who live in sexual unions, still another boost in fairness. A fifth is that it would provide a mutually acceptable compromise between those who now support domestic partner policies and those who now oppose them. A sixth is that the Christian organization would be able to use its purchasing power to help many people benefit from insurance policies they otherwise could not afford.

A seventh advantage is that by increasing the number of their enrollees the insurance companies would spread the risks they cover among more people, an economic advantage if the fees they charge are appropriate. An eighth is that by implementing this approach the organization would foster stable and supportive relationships of all sorts, unions that are greatly needed in our increasingly fragmented and isolating societies. Consistent with sound financial administration, this should be a major priority of the package of benefits Christian organizations offer their employees.

What about the tuition benefits now received by some employees of Christian organizations who send their children to a denomination’s schools? The time will probably come when those who do not receive these benefits will challenge such current policies on the grounds that they are not being paid equal pay for equal work. As has been done with some other benefits already, it therefore probably would be prudent gradually to phase out tuition benefits and to distribute the savings among all employees as increases in their regular compensation. Leaving tuition benefits as they now are until they are challenged legally may prove to be the more costly option in the long run.

As this question about tuition benefits reveals, we are in the midst of changes in our principles of remuneration that have been underway for some time. Earlier generations of Christians often made it a priority to pay people according to their actual needs. One advantage of this approach is that it fostered a sense of collegiality by covering as many of an employee’s expenses as possible when they actually occurred. One of its disadvantages is that sometimes disagreements erupted and mistakes were made when Christian organizations tried to determine what an employee’s actual expenses were.

Women who were single parents sometimes received less in salary and benefits than did men without children and employed wives, for instance. Problems of this sort, plus certain external pressures, encouraged us to move toward the principle of equal pay for equal work. Properly formulated and administered, domestic partner policies would move us further down this same road.

This appears to be the direction in which we should travel. We should do so without becoming embroiled in debates about the moral worth of permanent and exclusive homosexual unions. Provided they occur in ways appropriate for Christian men and women, these debates can and should continue in other settings. After all, Christians of intelligence and integrity differ today in their moral assessments of these forms of companionship.

But let’s discuss one issue at a time. Let’s do so in the best times and places. And let’s do everything we can to foster stable and supportive relationships among ourselves and those we serve!

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