Secretary Clinton will soon be extending benefits to same-sex partners of Foreign Service members, according to a draft memo first reported about at Advocate.com. The Bush administration had resisted such efforts.
Currently, same-sex partners are denied benefits given to heterosexual partners. These benefits include: paid travel to and from partners' posts abroad, transport of household belongings, use of medical facilities at overseas posts, inclusion in calculations of family size for housing, visas and diplomatic passports, emergency travel to visit sick partners, and emergency evacuation.
These benefits will be given to all unmarried domestic partners, regardless of whether partners are of the same sex or opposite. In the draft memo, Clinton writes:
Historically, domestic partners of Foreign Service members have not been provided the same training, benefits, allowances, and protections that other family members receive. These inequities are unfair and must end.
Clinton also wrote that extending domestic-partner benefits will:
help the [State] Department attract and retain personnel in a competitive environment where domestic partner benefits and allowances are increasingly the norm for world-class employers.
State Department officials aim to make the policy official before the summer transfer season starts.
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