A Step Forward for Our Families

Via Daily Kos, I just learned that a Vermont judge has ruled that same sex couples in civil unions have the same rights as married couples regarding their children.

Same-sex couples joined together in a civil union have the same rights regarding their children as do heterosexual couples, a judge in Vermont ruled, contradicting an earlier court decision in Virginia, according to a newspaper report.

The ruling last week by Judge William Cohen conflicts with an earlier Virginia court’s ruling, which gave only the biological parent custody of the child.

Cohen said that Janet Miller-Jenkins of Fair Haven, Vermont has the same rights as a parent of two-year-old Isabella as does Lisa Miller-Jenkins, who gave birth to her using artificial insemination before the couple split up, the Rutland Herald reported on Sunday. Lisa Miller-Jenkins now lives in Virginia with the child, the daily noted.

“Parties to a civil union who use artificial insemination to conceive a child can be treated no differently than a husband and wife who, unable to conceive a child biologically, choose to conceive a child by inseminating the wife with the sperm of an anonymous donor,” Cohen ruled.

I’m trying to cautiously optimistic, but I can’t help thinking of this as a huge step foward, because I judge found that a same sex couple in a civil union had the same rights as a heterosexual married couple. DHinMI, the author of the post points out that the case also underscores that—like lots of heterosexual coupes—gay couples get “divoreced” sometimes, and the legal rights of the partners have to get sorted out where a civil union or other legally recognized relationship is involved.

This just underscores that in most cases we don’t have a fair method of legally determining and protecting the rights of individuals who are extricating themselves from a committed relationship with same sex partner; these couples are pretty much strangers to the law in most places, operating in a legal no-man’s-land where chances are that no equitable parting of ways can be achieved. As more and more of us come together in committed relatinoships and start raising families, these issues are going to come up more often, and find their way into the courts more often, because a lot of the time there isn’t any other arena in which to resolve the disputes that inevitably arise when a relationship or a family falls apart.

That lends some sense of inevitability to the notion that our society will eventually have to come up with ways of dealing with these situations. And since many of those methods will have their roots in family law applied to married heterosexuals, mabye it really is just a matter of time before our families are treated equally by the law.

People can rant all they want about “activisit judges” who try to “create new law.” The truth is that the courts are a legitimate route for minorities to seek justice that the majority would deny them. A commenter on Kos pointed out, before the wheels came off and the dicsussion veered off on a tangent, that these types of cases will most likely result in challenges to the “Super-DOMA” laws of the states, and perhaps all the way up to the federal law, and perhaps all the way up to the Supreme Court.

I know some people think the matter of gay and lesbian equality is better left to the legislature and the voters than to the courts. The reality is that’s a nice situatio for the majority, because they can put off dealing with what makes them uncomfortable, and it sucks for the minority because they have to endure injustice without recourse or remedy for longer than they might otherwise.