Tomorrow, the Labor Department will issue a new ruling clarifying that the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows “individuals who are the non-legal, non biological parents of their same-sex partner’s children” to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave to take care of a sick child. The move is one in a longer list of changes that will explicitly extend benefits to gays and lesbian Americans, but some gay activists have dismissed the advances as inadequate. The AP ran a story titled, ‘Obama inches toward gay agenda,’ describing the change as “[t]he little things that the Beltway crowd pays attention to.”

But as Pat Garofalo explains, the problem isn’t that guaranteed unpaid sick leave is inadequate because it’s not ENDA or DADT. It’s inadequate because it only really benefits those who can afford to take days off without being paid for them:

Lack of paid leave not only means sick employees coming in to work, but sick children being sent to school by parents who can’t afford to take time off to care for them. In fact, according to a new survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago “nearly twice as many workers without paid sick days (24 percent) have sent a sick child to school or daycare than workers with paid sick days (14 percent).” 16 percent of those polled “say they have lost a job for taking time off from work to care for a sick child or family member, or to cope with their own illness.”

“This new survey shows conclusively that our nation is paying a high price for not allowing workers to earn paid sick days,” said Deborah Leff, president of the Public Welfare Foundation. “It demonstrates that not having paid sick days drives up the costs of health care and causes more people to go to work sick, creating public health risks for everyone.” In order to rectify this situation, Congress could pass the Healthy Families Act, which would guarantee seven paid sick days to all employees at firms with more than 15 employees, which could also be used to care for sick children or family members.

The real benefits of sick leave won’t be felt by everyone until this country joins every other industrialized nation and mandates paid sick leave. Unfortunately, by framing this exclusively as an LGBT equality issue, and viewing it through the prism of the broader LGBT ‘agenda,’ we avoid that important conversation.

Marc Ambinder has the most interesting bits from the now-infamous Rolling Stone article in which Gen. Stanley McChrystal claims that President Obama was unprepared for a meeting with military officials and takes jabs at National Security Adviser Jim Jones and Vice President Joe Biden. A reportedly furious Obama has summoned McChrystal back to Washington and is expected to reprimand McChrystal for insubordination.

And while the General’s comments about Obama are certainly inexcusable, his aide’s remarks about gay people are no less offensive. They should also receive the requisite public condemnation and the yet-to-be-identified aide should be promptly dismissed:

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I ask one of his aides. “Some French minister,” the aide tells me. “It’s fucking gay.”

The comment underscores the existing locker-room style homophobia in the armed forces and explains why we won’t be seeing gay pride parades or a mass coming out once Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed. But these remarks are also as insubordinate as anything McChrystal said about Obama’s military strategy because they come in the midst of the administration’s efforts to repeal the policy, a goal Obama officially announced earlier this year at his State of the Union address.

If Obama is serious about building a more tolerant military culture he will demand that McChrystal publicly distance himself from these remarks, fire the offending aide, but also demand sharp assurances from Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen that they will institute a non-discrimination policy once DADT is repealed. After all, a military that discriminates against gays is of course going to breed this kind of homophobic rhetoric.