Domestic partner benefits get SGA nod

UCF is considering whether to give domestic partnership benefits to their faculty and staff in the LGBT community.

On April 14, the Student Government Association Senate showed its support for these benefits by passing a resolution that officially expressed their support for domestic partnership benefits at UCF.

The passing of this resolution was supposed to symbolize the entire student body's support for domestic partnership benefits.

Domestic partnership has health- and dental-insurance benefits that are given to employees in same-sex partnerships and are extended to both individuals in the partnership.

Domestic partnership benefits differ from traditional insurance benefits as the coverage from traditional insurance benefits only extends to opposite-sex spouses and children.

I truly hope that the rest of the student body supports having domestic partnership benefits at UCF, as they will draw in high-quality professors and staff, which will further strengthen UCF's outstanding quality of education; as well as diversify the UCF community.

UCF is the second-largest school in nation — bigger than most of the other schools that already offer domestic partnership benefits. I believe that UCF needs to do everything in its power to further strengthen and promote our reputation so that in the near future, UCF's name will more powerfully represent our massive amount of students and everything else we bring to the table.

If we need to hire the best professors and staff that we can, there should not be anything preventing us from doing so, as we should try to obtain the highest possible quality of education.

On a more individual level, students should support the offering of domestic partnership benefits to UCF faculty and staff simply because we are the reason that UCF exists — we are the students that pay thousands of dollars in tuition each year to the university, and we have the right to believe that every single dollar that we pay to this school will go toward bettering our education.

 Students should continue to support the staff, faculty, and fellow peers in the LGBT community, as they make our campus more diverse, and as students, we should be more than happy to provide an accepting, tolerant environment for them — as well as anyone else that walks onto the UCF campus.

Most importantly, the fact that UCF has decided to offer domestic partnership benefits to its faculty and employees means that UCF has taken yet another step to support the LGBT community.

 As "community" is a part of the UCF creed, all UCF students should be accepting of all of the people in our diverse community of 56,235 unique students, as we are all attending UCF for the same reasons — to get a high quality education in order to better ourselves and better our futures.