Adam Sandler Policy-Making

GovExec's Alyssa Rosenberg filed this item from Capitol Hill:

I was at a hearing today at the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on whether or not the federal government should extend insurance and retirement benefits to the same-sex domestic partners of federal employees. A large portion of the debate centered around whether or not extending those benefits would increase incidences of fraud, encouraging employees to fake relationships to obtain benefits for friends or to not report when a relationship ended to keep their former partner insured or in line for retirement benefits.

That conversation got a little strange, though, when Office of Personnel Management Deputy Director Howard Weizmann made reference to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the 2007 Adam Sandler-Kevin James buddy flick in which the two men play New York City firefighters and best friends who pretend to be a gay couple so one of the men can keep his pension. The movie, Weizmann said, showed that fraud was a real possibility.

The thing about the movie, though, is that it's a terrible argument for trying to commit insurance fraud. Chuck and Larry get caught, after being subject to an extremely intrusive investigation of their relationship by a terrifyingly cheerful bureaucrat. Larry talks Chuck into the scheme in the first place because city pension law is screwed up: after his wife's death, he's not able to name his children his beneficiaries. In other words, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry works better as an indictment of overly rigid benefit laws than as a warning of mass criminal tendencies in the gay community.

But hey, maybe Weizmann has a point about Sandler movies and policy questions. As one of my friends put it, "Maybe we should call a hearing to determine if there is much Happy Gilmore-style violence occurring in professional golf."