UTAH AMENDMENT FOES SAY GAYS AND THEIR CHILDREN NEED PROTECTIONS: From the Deseret Morning News

Lorie Hutchinson can't marry her lesbian partner Chris Johnson. She can't adopt Johnson's 12-year-old daughter, Olivia White.

In short, she says, she can't defend her family with a simple legal document that automatically affords more than 1,000 legal protections and responsibilities -- a marriage license. ...

"I don't have any rights," Johnson said. "This doesn't take away my rights because I have no rights as a lesbian. . . . Right now we're not a (legal) family; we're roommates with a child."

The couple can piecemeal together some legal protections such as a will, powers of attorney or hospital visitation rights. But they and other opponents to the proposed amendment say it threatens even those existing protections.

"All it takes is one blood relative," Hutchinson notes, to challenge a will or other legal contract she and her partner have entered into.

Their family isn't the only one fearing that the amendment would forever bar them from the same legal protections that married, heterosexual families have.

They're among an estimated 2,568 with children, headed by same-sex unmarried partners in Utah, according to an analysis of the 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Sample by Pam Perlich, senior research economist at the University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

The sample data suggested that some 66 percent of the roughly 3,912 same-sex partner-headed households are raising children.

Children in these families are particularly vulnerable when it comes to their parents' divorce or death, because Utah's adoption law only allows married couples and single adults to adopt, said attorney Jane Marquardt, a board member of Equality Utah. ...

By denying recognition to gay and lesbian families, states deny their children stability and other benefits such as health insurance, said Joseph Hagan, past chairman of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health. Hagan was an author of his association's statement advocating same-sex parent adoption.

"We really didn't in the academy talk about marriage. . . . We talked about the needs of the kids to have a family," he said."I've researched the data. If there is data suggesting poor, or even a poorer outcome compared to the 'ideal' for these children, we couldn't find it."

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posted by Eve at 4:02 PM VOTE

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