This Wednesday, August 8, Portland City Council will hear the first ever challenge to the city’s Equal Benefits Ordinance, which is designed to require city contractors to provide benefits to same-sex partners of employees if the company offers benefits to employees’ spouses.

But the challenge, coming from Qwest, isn’t what you might expect.

Qwest is not currently in compliance with the EBO, but has a contract coming up with the city to provide services for the 9-1-1 network. Qwest and the city have gone back and forth for months negotiating a waiver of the EBO requirements, and the Bureau of Technology Services and the Bureau of Purchasing have agreed to grant a waiver, since Qwest is the only company who can fill the contract. (Not to get too technical, but it’s a “sole source” exemption, which is allowed under the ordinance.)

Infuriating, right? One of the largest companies in the area is using its dominance to avoid a city ordinance designed to treat workers fairly and equally.

Only, here’s the complication: Qwest actually does provide health coverage to same-sex partners of its employees—it has for nearly a decade. What the company doesn’t do is provide benefits to opposite-sex partners of employees if they aren’t married. Unfortunately for Qwest, the city’s EBO doesn’t allow for that kind of “discrimination”—it requires that domestic partners, regardless of the gender makeup of the couple, to be offered benefits.

Another way to read that: Qwest is out of compliance with the ordinance because it discriminates against straight employees.

*I don’t think the comparison is funny either.*

Of course, to reach that conclusion, you have to buy into the framing of opponents of civil unions, who argue that they give “special privileges” to same-sex couples. That’s stretching reality; straight couples can legally get married, and domestic partnerships (and civil unions) are merely an attempt at gaining some of those protections.

So, is Qwest discriminating against straight employees, or is the city’s policy misguided in requiring benefits for straight domestic partners? Hopefully, Qwest’s challenge will force city council to address that question on Wednesday. (Council won’t vote on the waiver; that’s at the discretion of the bureaus. But they will be voting on the contract, which they can shoot down if they disagree with the bureaus’ decision.)

Commissioner Sam Adams, whose office crafted the ordinance, and Mayor Tom Potter already appear to be reluctantly ready to allow the waiver to go through.

“Qwest appears to be honoring the intent of the ordinance, which is to provide benefits to same-sex domestic partners,” says mayoral staffer Kevin Easton. “If this was a competitive bid, with one company fully in compliance and one not, it’d be a different story.”

Bottom line: Are we still having this discussion in the post-Sicko world? Doesn’t tying one’s health coverage to their job—or to their partner, and then to their sexual orientation—seem about as crazy as letting Adam Sandler be in a movie about straight men pretending to be gay?