Breaking: Federal Court Rules Utah Must Treat Same-Sex Parents As It Treats Different-Sex Parents

A federal court just provided an important precedent for same-sex parents adopting children.  

Video from April

A Utah same-sex couple will be feeling more secure soon. A federal judge just ruled that the State of Utah must treat them the same way it would treat a different-sex couple who are adopting.

Angie Roe and Kami Roe were legally married in Utah, but the State is requiring them to jump through hoops because it refused to automatically add Kami to their newborn daughter’s birth certificate. 

Today, “U.S. District Judge Dee Benson issued a preliminary injunction that forces Utah to issue a birth certificate recognizing both women as Lucy’s parents and to change its policies for all other married lesbian couples,” the Salt Lake Tribune reports. 

“A same-sex spouse and a different-sex spouse whose wife conceives through donor insemination are similarly situated in all relevant aspects,” the ACLU argued in court. “The purpose of the statutes is to immediately establish parentage for a spouse who has consented to bringing a child into the world, whether or not that spouse shares a genetic relationship with the child.”

As she says in the video above, from April, Angie Roe was not feeling secure or equal when she and her wife brought the lawsuit with the help of the ACLU.

“Right now in the eyes of the law I’m not her parent,” Angie Roe had told local Utah Fox affiliate back in April. “We just want to be treated the same under the law as opposite sex couples are.”

The State of Utah required same-sex couples who want both parents’ names on their children’s birth certificates to go through a lengthy and expensive step-parent adoption process, a process it does not require different-sex couples in the exact same situation to endure.

“A couple of months of waiting is not nothing,” Leah Farrell, staff attorney with the ACLU of Utah had told Fox13. “The security or the lack of security that are in those months is a real thing but beyond that there’s just the principle of equality that they are being treated differently just because of gender of one of the people in the couples and that’s not right.”

 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly spelled Kami Roe’s first name. We apologize for the error.

Image: Screenshot via Fox13