Family Law
Celebrating Diverse Families
What makes a family?
Who decides who qualifies as a family?
What protections should a family have?
These questions and many more inform Legal Voice's Celebrating Diverse Families Initiative. Several years ago, we realized that the areas of family law, lesbian and gay rights, assisted reproductive technology, and reproductive freedom were linked by the core question of who gets treated as a "family." And we realized that the law was hopelessly outdated as far as who is recognized as a "family." So we set out to reform state laws—one by one if necessary—to ensure that all families, whether different-sex or same-sex, inter-generational, single-parent, or child-free, are recognized and protected by the law.
In April 2007, the Washington Legislature passed the landmark legislation HR 1351, which created a domestic partner registry and granted some critical rights to same-sex couples and different-sex couples when at least one partner is 62 or older. The Washington Legislature expanded on the original legislation in 2008, increasing the number of rights and responsibilities from 23 to over 180. Changes included economic protections relating to community property, taxes on property transfers, and veteran's benefits, as well as meaningful personal rights such as allowing domestic partners who are residents of a nursing home to share a room, considering domestic partners as family members for purposes of victim's rights in the judicial process, and ensuring that that domestic partners don't have to testify against one another in court.
In the 2009 legislative session, Legal Voice has been working to help pass legislation to provide registered domestic partners with all the remaining rights and responsibilities available to married spouses. This legislation is progressing through the State House and Senate, and we are confident that it will be passed by the end of the legislative session.
Keep informed about our work in the Washington Legislature to provide equal rights for all families by signing up for our legislative updates.
Celebrating Diverse Families: Victories
- Establishing that non-biological lesbian parents and others who have parented a child can be legally recognized and have the right to retain their relationship with their child.
In re Parentage of L.B. - Obtaining the right for lesbian and gay couples to have their property divided equitably when their relationship ends, just as different-sex unmarried couples do.
Vasquez v. Hawthorne; Gormley v. Robertson - Fighting for the rights of all couples to marry, without regard to sexual orientation.
Andersen v. King County - Ensuring that frozen "pre-embryos" are not treated as children, and that decision-making about them does not depend on genetic connection.
Litowitz v. Litowitz - Forcing the University of Montana to provide domestic partner benefits to same-sex couples as well as to unmarried different-sex couples.
Snetsinger v. University of Montana - Educating grandparents and other kinship caregivers about their rights and how the legal system can help them.
For information on your legal rights, see Family Law.
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