Family Research Council Drops Pretense; Advocates Extra Taxes for Gays

Interesting article from Jim Brown (no relation) of fake news site ONN reporting on the FRC‘s reaction to a bill signed into law by soon-to-be-former President Bush on December 23, 2008.

The bill in question is the Worker, Retiree and Employer Recovery Act of 2008. One provision mandates that in the event of an employee’s death, companies permit the transfer of retirement savings without tax penalty to non-spouse beneficiaries, including same-gender partners. Previously, the benefit was optional.

The FRC, of course, has a problem with this.

Peter Sprigg is vice president for policy at the Family Research Council in Washington, DC. He says the new law is an example of how homosexual activists have made many of their policy advances.

“Sometimes they throw the long ball, so to speak, and have these big court cases that declare same-sex ‘marriage’ [sic] to be the law of the state, like we’ve seen in Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut,” says Sprigg. “And other times it’s the ground game, so to speak — just grinding it out with these short little plays that advance their agenda a yard at a time.”

Sprigg says the practical impact of the new law benefiting same-sex couples will be minimal, but it will have a troubling cumulative effect. He believes the more such benefits are accrued by same-sex couples, the more plausible it appears for them to argue they should be treated just the same as married couples in everything.

I actually agree with Mr. Sprigg (left) on this. The only difference is that I see it as a reasonable change, and he thinks it would be better if same-gender spouses and beneficiaries were assigned an additional tax to receive the retirement savings that opposite-gender spouses receive for free.

I can see this backfiring on both FRC and ONN. Retired people make up a large percentage of ONN’s readership, and they know how difficult it can be to deal with financial arrangements after a spouse’s death. I’m not so sure those people are going to be up for saying outright that there should be extra hurdles and expenses for gays when their partner dies.

In fact, both comments currently attached to the ONN article are extremely negative, a phenomenon that ONN generally doesn’t permit. Maybe the leaders of the anti-gay crowd have gotten over-confident and people will start to see just how shockingly hateful they really are.

 

Incidentally, I really do try to find not-horrible pictures of people, so I feel I need to point out that the picture I used of Mr. Sprigg, for which he apparently parted his hair with a band saw, is the official picture offered by the FRC.

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