New Justice is Seated So Indiana Asks the Supreme Crt To Strip Parental Rights of Gay Couples

 Indiana, home of The No.2 Homophobe at the White House but Actually is number one in the nation as a hater for this community.  

U.S. state of Indiana has asked the Supreme Court to consider a case involving whether same-sex couples have the same right to presumed parenthood that opposite-sex couples do. The newly conservative court waited until right wing Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed before considering the case.

Barrett’s first major case after being confirmed involved LGBT+ rights and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have recently decried the Court’s decision to legalise same-sex marriage, saying it should be overturned.

Slate documents the strange twists and turns the case, originally filed in 2017, has taken to get before the Court. Similar cases have been shot down by lower courts and the Supreme Court itself previously.

The case involves eight married lesbian couples who had children with the help of artificial insemination. In each couple, both mothers should be listed on their child’s birth certificate, but Indiana is refusing to do so, according to ‘LGBTQ Nation’. 

A mother’s husband is listed on the child’s birth certificate because he is presumed to be the child’s father – even if the opposite-sex couple used a sperm donor – but Indiana is arguing that a woman married to the mother doesn’t have a biological connection to the child and therefore should not be presumed to be a parent.

One of the couples has a dual connection to their child. One woman carried the pregnancy using an egg donated by her wife. All of the couples used sperm donors.

The case gives the Supreme Court a chance to start chipping away at marriage equality in the United States as it has similarly done with abortion rights. Marriage, for opposite-sex couples, comes with presumed fatherhood, but now the Court could say that that benefit only applies to straight couples.

In the Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that legalised same-sex marriage throughout the U.S., the Court said gay couples are entitled to marriage “on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.”

And in Pavan v. Smith, the Court summarily reversed an Arkansas Supreme Court decision that held that birth certificates were documents containing “biological” information, requiring the state to grant presumed parenthood to the wives of mothers. A Florida case met a similar fate.

But in Box v Henderson, the Indiana case, the Court has taken remarkable steps to ensure they would likely hear the case. The case deliberately challenges Pavan by dubiously claiming the state can reasonably assume a male is the father without so much as a DNA test, but two women require sperm to make a child, so they can’t both be parents.

A three-judge panel for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals heard the case in early 2017 but waited 32 months to issue a decision that sided with the mothers. The panel of conservative judges finally ruled unanimously on behalf of the mothers.

If the appeals court had issued the ruling during the customary time period – about three months – the Supreme Court would still include Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the Obergefell ruling, and liberal stalwart and LGBT+ ally Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both justices have been replaced with far-right ideologues.

And instead of summarily denying the case as it had previously done, the Court has now rescheduled a private conference hearing on the case that would have happened shortly after Ginsburg’s death. A day before the case was to be heard, the Court asked the mothers to respond to the appeal, a sign that they are interested in taking up the case.

If the Court rules for Indiana, Slate warns, “same-sex couples will need to prepare for a ruling that could turn them into legal strangers to their own kids.” 

Read related myGwork articles here:

Supreme Court Hears Case Whether Adoption Agencies Can Discriminate Against LGBT+ People