News-Record.com

This morning, we write about the legal question of whether local governments in North Carolina can offer health and other benefits to the unmarried domestic partners of their employees.

While there are many religious, moral, business and practical reasons for or against such policies, the following are examinations of the legal ramifications of offering the benefits.

Greensboro's request: (read the entire letter here)Deputy City Attorney Becky Peterson-Buie asks Attorney General Roy Cooper for an opinion on whether the city can legally offer the benefits.

Charlotte's decision: The state's largest city explored offering the benefits in 2003, but city attorneys ruled in this memorandum that the city wasn't given the authority by state lawmakers to offer benefits to people other than employees' dependents.

That reasoning was disputed by proponents of the benefits, who pointed out that while state law doesn't specifically say cities can do it, it also doesn't say they can't. You can read the Mecklenburg Gay & Lesbian Political Action Committee's response here.

Durham County: After a long debate there, Durham County officials took a middle route, offering benefits only to the same-sex partners of employees, not heterosexual ones. In this memo, County Attorney S.C. Kitchen writes that as a part of becoming eligible for the benefit, the employee would have to affirm that he or she was living with his or her significant other as a couple. According to state law, a man and a woman living together in such a manner is a Class 2 misdemeanor, the crime of "fornication and adultery."

The same prohibition does not apply to homosexual couples, because state law does not make it a crime for two people of the same sex to live together as a couple. Kitchen notes that while sexual relations between two people of the same sex is illegal, a "crime against nature" as the law states, merely applying for the benefits wouldn't require a homosexual couple to admit to breaking the law.