How Can We Balance Rights of LGBT Employees
and Conflicting Religious Beliefs?
Luke Visconti: More than half of the Fortune 500
companies have given partner benefits, but the remaining companies are struggling; companies that are
interested in diversity and still have not given partner
benefits are really having a problem with this, and it
is a crisis at these companies. The interesting defining
line for companies is those that do not express clear
values have the most problems. And by not expressing a value, especially with LGBT benefits, if you say,
“Well, we are examining this,” then you have made
a decision to discriminate against people who have
same-gender relationships—it’s that simple. There is
no such thing as backlash in an organization that has
clearly stated values and stands by them. In the absence
of that, you have endless opportunity for conflict.
Herrschaft: People’s certain religious beliefs are at
play, and there needs to be
leadership and it needs to
be constant, and we’re not
about changing personal
values. It’s an interesting
thing on activism when
a gay or lesbian person
goes into the workplace
and they choose to put a
picture up on their desk of
their partner. Is that activism? I don’t think so.
The public-policy
debate that we’ve had on
same-sex couples has been
particularly divisive, but
for HR people, they are
living in a diverse world
on a daily basis and so the
question of whether or
not a person can pro-
duce a marriage license or a domestic-partner license
or whatever is really irrelevant to their lives and to
their administration benefits. It’s whether or not an
employee has a family member who needs to go see
the dentist. And so you’ve seen that a majority of the
Fortune 500 companies have instituted these benefits.
Within the last year, we did a focus group on GLBT
people and a focus group on straight-identified people
and we found a great wall between them. But they
said the exact same thing; the GLBT people said they
do not want to say the wrong thing, they don’t want
to appear to be foisting an agenda on someone and
they would welcome additional conversation about
this. And the group of straight folks also said that they
don’t want to ask the wrong question and they would
