Gov. Brewer drops domestic-partner benefits in Arizona

This state is consistently becoming the place of major foolishness.

As soon as the former Gov. Janet Napolitano leaves, the new governor and twit, Jan Brewer signs a new bill that erases state employee benefits from domestic partners.

This was created a year ago and now this heifer, just erases it as if it was an extra comma. However, Jan needs to remember this affects Arizona's state universities. Nobody who's LGBT would want to work there, let alone be in that state.

About 800 state employees are affected, according to the state's administration department.

UA President Robert Shelton planned to issue a memo to college employees today alerting them to the change in benefits.

"We need to come up with a way this university can aid these individuals in buying separate coverage," Shelton said at a staff meeting Tuesday. "Because they're employees here, they qualify for benefits here, they should just like all of us do — and in this case they've been eliminated through a bill that I'm tempted to characterize but will restrain myself from certain adjectives."

Liz Sawyer, a UA staff member, said the exclusion is "deplorable and it's tragic."

Sawyer is a spokeswoman for OUTReach, a staff group that lobbies for domestic-partner benefits at UA.

Last year 170 UA employees signed up for domestic-partner benefits, she said. Forty were same-sex couples and the remainder were unmarried, opposite-sex couples, she said.

If they think this saves money, then they are fools. This forces the LGBT community to go elsewhere, like Cali-Cal.