This Case Could Let the Supreme Court Roll Back Marriage Equality
Two of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, recently urged their colleagues to hear a challenge to the court’s five-year-old ruling on marriage equality. In an October written opinion, Alito and Thomas claimed that the SCOTUS ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges presented threats to religious freedom “that only it can fix.”
According to Slate, the right-wing judges may get their wish sooner rather than later. In a Tuesday report, the publication claims that the nine Supreme Court justices will meet on December 11 to decide whether to take up a challenge to same-sex parental rights. On Monday, Indiana’s attorney general, Curtis Hill, filed a petition urging the court to review a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in January which found that state’s refusal to list both same-sex parents on their child’s birth certificate is unconstitutional. It’s the second such petition from Indiana this year.
The long-running case, known as Box v. Henderson, dates back six years. In 2014, the Tippecanoe County Health Department refused Ashlee and Ruby Henderson, a lesbian couple who live in Lafayette, Indiana, a birth certificate for their newborn child which would have bore both of their names. According to the Journal and Courier newspaper, the Hendersons blacked out the entry for “Father” on the form and wrote in “Mother #2” instead, but the change was rejected.
The couple filed a lawsuit in 2015, along with seven other couples, challenging the decision as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause under the 14th Amendment — which requires governmental entities to extend “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana ruled in favor of the couples in June 2016 and then the 7th Circuit unanimously agreed earlier this year.
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https://www.them.us/story/supreme-court-case-roll-back-lgbtq-marriage-equality
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If the husband in a hetreo marriage is not the biological father of the child.
From the article linked in the OP:
“This case, then, is about whether Indiana may, to advance its unquestionably legitimate policy of safeguarding the rights and obligations of biological parents in the context of completing birth certificates,” Hill claims.
But while Hill has argued that Indiana’s policy is merely about “common-sense” guidelines based on “biological facts,” Slate notes that these anti-trans dog whistles don’t actually apply to the grounds of the case. “It’s untrue that a birth mother’s wife always has ‘no biological connection’ to her child, as Hill insists,” the publication writes. “One set of plaintiffs in this case, a lesbian couple, prove this point: One partner provided an egg, and her wife carried the child.”
So if Indiana wants to claim they are only relying on biology to keep same both sex parents from being listed on a birth certificate, they must be consistent and require that ONLY biological parents be listed. This means every sperm donor will be outed, children born in wedlock but not fathered by the legal spouse would have to have the biological father named, etc. Every adopted child will have their biological parents listed, even when it means a lot of heart ache for all involved.
In fact, this law should mean that every child and purported parents must be DNA tested to make sure the information on the birth certificate is valid.
If the right wingers want to deny same sex parents their rights to do what many, many hetero parents have done for decades and put the legal parents rather than the biological parents, let's take it to the extreme with DNA testing required for every child born.
