Even Wal-Mart Gets It...

The largest private employer in the United States (the U.S. federal government is the largest over-all) is Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart announced on Friday that it has expanded the definition of "immediate family" to include same-sex couples who have domestic partnerships or civil unions in the states where such legislation has been enacted. (I'm not exactly sure what this caveat implies, since only Vermont, New Jersey and California have civil union/statewide domestic partner laws with teeth, while Massachusetts is the only state with full marriage equality.) Regardless, this just goes to show that even a very conservative company like Wal-Mart, which is based in Arkansas and evil in a number of different ways, gets it. If you want to recruit and retain talented individuals, you have to offer the most flexible range of benefits, and having an expanded definition of immediate family is one relatively easy way of doing this. In fact, it's been private firms and the corporate sector who have really been the engine for the acceleration of recognition of same-sex domestic partnership rights for the last decade.