provide equality

A community pool might seem like an odd place to strike a blow for equal rights and fighting discrimination, but it's as good a place as many, and it's an area where bad policy recently has come to light.

We're talking about the case of Patti Jaworski and her partner, a same-sex couple told they don't qualify for family membership at Clark's pool because -- despite being together for eight years, and despite having held a private commitment ceremony together four years ago -- they're not considered a family under the state's definition. With the state definition providing the underpinnings for the pool policies, it's that simple: If you're not a legally married heterosexual couple, then you're not a family.

That's a defensible argument, legally speaking, but it leaves a bad taste. Is the intent here to serve the community, or to find legal justification to avoid taking a potentially risky stand? It seems like the latter. The hot potato of whether a same-sex couple should qualify for family rates has been passed up the chain of command from the word go. Assistant Pool Manager Rose Tomchak told Jaworski to ask the Pool Advisory Board, which passed the responsibility on to the Township Council, which let the township attorney dismiss the request with an embarrassing swiftness.

That's not just irresponsible, it's cowardly. At any point, somebody could have stepped forward and displayed some much-needed leadership on this issue, but no one did. As a consequence, an essentially discriminatory practice has gone unchallenged, and that's a shame. Does anyone seriously believe that the pool membership policy is intended to favor one living arrangement or sexual orientation over another? That's absurd. Such policies exist out of a recognition that families are an essential building block of any community, and that communities possess an obligation to accommodate those families. That accommodation should exist for nontraditional households as well as traditional ones.

To that end, the pool utility should alter its membership structure to include one for households. A wider catch-all than "family," which is more narrowly defined, household memberships could be available to domestic partnerships such as Jaworksi's, but also could encompass other arrangements such as unmarried boyfriends and girlfriends, with or without children; adult siblings living together; and so on. Such a setup recognizes the township's civil obligation to treat different lifestyles and situations equally, but does not tamper with the traditional definition of family used elsewhere in the township and in the state.

Given the glacial speed that municipal government moves, there clearly is no chance the Township Council fully can rectify its error before the end of the pool season is in sight. What it can do is offer Jaworski and her partner a formal apology for its decision, and take steps to remedy the situation for next year.