Condi: Pets More Important Than Domestic Partners

Michael E. Guest, the American Ambassador to Romania, resigned this Tuesday in protest over the shabby treatment of gays employed by the U.S. State Department. We should probably not be shocked, at this point, by any homophobia exhibited by the gang in the White House (which, it should be pointed out, appointed Guest to his post in the first place), but the inequality between married straights and would-be-married gays could mean the difference between life and death in the increasingly volatile world of international relations. The Washington Post:

For instance, same-sex partners -- or unmarried heterosexual partners -- are refused anti-terrorism security training or foreign-language training and are not evacuated when eligible family members are ordered to depart. Unlike spouses, they do not receive diplomatic passports, visas or even use of the State Department mail system. They also must pay their own way overseas, get their own medical care and are left to fend for themselves if a partner is sent to a dangerous post such as Iraq.

Or, as Guest put it in his farewell speech:

It's irrational that my partner can't be trained in how to recognize a terrorist threat, or an intelligence trap. How is that in our overseas communities' interests, or in those of the Department?

As a matter of fact, not only do unmarried partners receive less consideration than spouses from the State Department, they receive less consideration than pets. As Dan Savage notes, a diplomat's poodle gets a free ride to and from an overseas assignment, but his or her partner has to make separate travel arrangements. If the situation in Baghdad were to escalate into a last-chopper-out-of-Saigon scenario, that could be bad, bad news.

Whose responsibility is this? Why, the whole mess can be laid at the feet of one Condoleezza Rice, who could singlehandedly change the absurd, discriminatory, and unsafe policies, if only she would respond to Guest's repeated and direct entreaties. You'd think that a diplomat chased by more lesbian rumors than Queen Latifah would be a little sympathetic to equal rights for gay diplomats--but oh how wrong you'd be.