President Obama, in pandering to the homosexual activists who supported him during his presidential run, yesterday mandated something that already exists — that almost all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of homosexuals and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health care decisions for them.
Like anyone else, homosexuals have the right by legal means to decide who should be able to visit them in the hospital, and even if the family rejects this, the doctor can overrule it if he/she deems it helpful to the patient’s recovery.
What have not existed are rules on the federal level to refer to a homosexual partner as a “spouse.” That is something the House Ethics Committee wrote into the rules that were posted on its website yesterday, but have since been taken down.
All Members of Congress, their spouses, and senior staff are required by law to fill out financial disclosure forms, and the ethics committee said that from now on they have to refer to their homosexual partners as “spouses.” This flies in the face of the Defense of Marriage Act, which was passed by significant margins in 1996 and signed into law by President Clinton.
The House Ethics Committee just overwrote federal law. But what else do you expect from an out-of-control Congress led by a President whose policies continue to undermine the foundation of country — the family?