From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Tue Jan 15 2002 - 14:28:12 MST
Brian D Williams wrote,
> >From: "Harvey Newstrom" <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com>
>
> >The Red Cross is giving assistance to such people for the first
> >time in their history. In previous disasters, they also refused
> >to provide assistance to such partners.
>
> The Red Cross? Are you sure about this?
Yes, I am sure about this. Just to clarify, I am talking about withholding
financial assistance to gay surviving partners of the victims. I am not
talking about withholding medical treatment from the injured.
They provide assistance to the family of survivors, not just to the injured.
In previous disasters, they did not recognize unmarried partners as
"family". However, in this case, New York has a law that requires domestic
same-sex partners receive the same benefits as married heterosexual couples.
Because of this law, the Red Cross lawyers decided that it might be illegal
to treat gay partners differently than married partners. This was a change
in policy. They had never extended aid to same-sex domestic partners
before.
Part of the reason was rumored to be the sheer number of gay partners in
this case. Because of the high death toll, they were facing hundreds of gay
partners. They did not want to refuse them all at once. Also, New York and
the WTC companies worked together to get aid for the victims. Because of
the New York law, they included gay partners in the list of survivors they
gave to the Red Cross. The Red Cross had never faced such a large number of
gay survivors all at once, nor had the requests come from government
officials or large corporations before. They were already under scrutiny
for diverting some WTC donations into their general fund, and did not want
to generate more controversy by refusing to assist all the people on the
survivor's lists.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant, Newstaff Inc. <www.Newstaff.com> Board of Directors, Extropy Institute <www.Extropy.org> Cofounder, Pro-Act <www.ProgressAction.org>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:37:34 MST