The Kentucky attorney general has issued an opinion saying new rules extending health insurance to the unmarried domestic partners of state university employees violate the state’s Constitution. But the opinion points out a way around the constitutional prohibition: Extend health benefits to everyone who lives in an employee’s household.

According to The Courier-Journal, a newspaper in Louisville, Ky., Attorney General Greg Stumbo was asked by state legislators to issue an opinion on the legality of the domestic-partner policies adopted recently by the Universities of Louisville and of Kentucky in light of a 2004 amendment to the state Constitution.

Daryl Herrschaft, director of the Workplace Project at the Human Rights Campaign — which lobbies for gay and lesbian people — says Mr. Stumbo’s solution is similar in principle to policies used by some corporations and nonprofit groups. Companies like Bank of America, for example, allow employees to add to their health-insurance policy one other person in their household — a domestic partner or an aging parent, for example. The provision is commonly known as “employee plus 1,” says Mr. Herrschaft, and it allows institutions to avoid the controversy that can arise when they specifically extend benefits to gay partners.

Mr. Herrschaft says Mr. Stumbo’s proposal to include everyone in a household is perhaps too broad. “I’m not sure it could be that wide open,” he says. But the principle, he says, is to “avoid arguments that sometimes come from recognizing gay families, while still providing the same protection to them.” —Robin Wilson