Agema’s hypocrisy: Cut state funds to universities with partnership benefits

[Commentary] The Chronicle News Service reports:

Universities who [sic] spend taxpayer dollars to provide health insurance benefits to their employees’ live-in partners should lose 5 percent of their state funding, one local lawmaker says.

State Rep. Dave Agema, R-Grandville, will be pushing the issue after Grand Valley State University (GVSU) last week approved providing the benefits to unmarried partners of faculty and staff.

“It’s a way to get around the law that was passed. No one else gets those benefits, and it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money,” Agema said Wednesday, just days after he called GVSU’s tuition “a good bang for the buck.”

That smell you’re detecting is the stench of hypocrisy.

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The constant refrain from supporters of the constitutional amendment that forbid universities from giving benefits to the partners of gay employees was that they could still provide such benefits as long as they didn’t do so on the basis of a gay relationship; all they had to do was broaden out the eligibility of such benefits and allow both gay and straight employees to designate a beneficiary and that would satisfy the law.

They seem to have left out the rest of the sentence: “…but if you do that, we’ll punish you for it.” Better yet, they’ll punish students for it. Decreasing state aid means increasing tuition. Agema is essentially proposing that students at MSU, U of M, GVSU and the other public universities in this state should have to pay higher tuition in order to indulge his anti-gay agenda. Fortunately, this year’s funding bills have already passed both houses in the Legislature and only await Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s signature.