8 ms·

The Lost History of Gay Adult Adoption

72 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

GeorgeOrr 11y ago
Not that long ago people tried to argue that marriage equality wasn't needed to protect basic rights of individuals involved. They just needed to use contracts/adoption/etc. This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.
- gwern 11y ago
  > This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was. I'm not sure what you mean. At no point does it indicate that the adoption tactic ever failed; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more than a change of paperwork. Based on this article, you would have to say that marriage equality wasn't needed to secure the basic rights like inheritance, hospital visitation, etc.
  - GeorgeOrr 11y ago
    The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights. And after all the gymnastics, they and only they had to endure, they ended up with approximation of what heterosexuals were able to accomplish with a conversation at a Justice of the Peace. The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution." It only seems successful to those who didn't need to do it.
    - mfoy_ 11y ago
      Not to mention it's just plain dehumanizing.
    - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
      >they and only they had to endure Lets not pretend that gay marriage is the last marriage equality that will have to be fought for, even if the ones to come seem as crazy to use as gay marriage seemed to many of those who fought for interracial marriage.
      - LordKano 11y ago
        Three person marriage is likely next. It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done.
        dragonwriter 11y ago
        > Three person marriage is likely next. > It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done. It actually hasn't; any two-party marriage uses the same infrastructure without problems, the differences are simply at the front door. Multiparty marriages need ground up redesign of the rights and privileges, which are all based on exclusive dyadic relationships. There's quite usable outlines of how the legal infrastructure might support many aspects of multiparty marriages (especially in terms of things like dissolution) in, e.g., the law of business partnerships, but the context and details of the rights and privileges tied to marriage are sufficiently different that there is a lot of work to do define even what a multiparty marriage would mean legally. Its not a simple equality step that can be addressed largely at the front door like interracial or even same-sex marriage.
        LordKano 11y ago
        "Equitable division of marital assets and liabilities." This doesn't require anything special. Legalizing same-sex marriage required changes on license forms, this will too.
        dragonwriter 11y ago
        > "Equitable division of marital assets and liabilities." > This doesn't require anything special. Right, and how to mechanically achieve this in multiparty relationships on dissolution is what I referred to as having a particularly good model in partnership law, because its done there a lot, and the wrinkles in how it works out have been pretty heavily hammered on over several centuries. The non-dissolution aspects of marital rights and privileges and how they would apply to multiparty relations (and whether existing explicit rules and legal presumptions built on the premise of a dyadic relationship work, or even make any sense, in multiparty relationships needs to be considered, area by area; for some aspects of this, again, partnership law probably has good models to follow as to how things might be generalized.) E.g., there's lots of things where spouses have either decisive rights or are necessarily included parties that must each consent, written based on the dyadic nature of existing marriage structure. Whether these generalize to every spouse having the same powers and requirements as a single spouse does now, or whether those powers require a majority of the members of the multiparty relationship, or some other rule in a multiparty case probably needs separate analysis for each of the areas.
    - peter303 11y ago
      I've seen it counted that marriage confers over 1000 contracts or rights. I dont know how may the other methods secure.
      - masklinn 11y ago
        > I've seen it counted that marriage confers over 1000 contracts or rights Way over 1000 in fact, back in 2004, at the federal level alone, the GAO identified "1049 federal statutory provisions […] contingent on marital status or in which marital status is a factor" http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04353r.pdf http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04353r.pdf
    - gwern 11y ago
      > The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights. Now you are moving goalposts. First you were all 'look at how total a failure this is and how this is proof marriage is the only possible option'; when I point out that it worked out just fine for all the people who did it, now you're backpedaling to complaining about 'gymnastics'. And as gymnastics go, having a parent fill out a form, enduring a rubberstamp social worker visit, and filling out some more paperwork is hardly an Olympic-level feat; especially when one consider what this gets you (a clever legal hack to secure a very large set of legal rights that would be unobtainable otherwise for 40 years or more, going by the mentioned years). The surprising thing is that it wasn't more common. > The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution." The article details how this worked out quite well for them. I don't see much of a 'patchwork' or discussion of the limits, or how the variation was a serious problem. (If you read OP, the biggest problem described seemed to be a hypothetical legal conundrum about some incest laws that the lawyers were still arguing between themselves about.)
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    Military members' adult children receive no benefits. Consequently, a US military member who used this method may have secured certain visitation and inheritance rights, but would not have qualified their spouse for access to the base, base hospital, insurance, and many other things. Hell, no one using this method would be able to cover their adult partner (over age 26, now, variously 18 or 21 in the past) under company health insurance. They wouldn't have qualified for any tax benefits of marriage (or penalties, for that matter). Combining property in joint accounts or joint ownership was slightly easier, but still not as straightforward as it is for married couples. > At no point does it indicate that the adoption tactic ever failed The adoption technique did not fail in that it achieved what it intended to achieve (primarily the basic legal rights and access of family members). But it did not achieve a marriage substitute, as it did not give them access to everything that marriage entailed. > ; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more than a change of paperwork. It secured some of the rights, it did not secure all or anywhere near most of them.
  - Laaw 11y ago
    Well, not to be pedantic, but the article actually does say the adoption tactic failed, at least once: > There had been an article in The Advocate about a couple in the Midwest who unsuccessfully tried to adopt each other in order to forge a legal bond.
    - 336f5 11y ago
      "adopting each other" is meaningless and the citation is vague. Some googling of The Advocate's website suggests this is probably a reference to Baker and McConnell, where the regular adoption did succeed: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/the-same-sex-couple-who-got-a-marriage-license-in-1971.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/the-same-sex-couple-who...
      - Laaw 11y ago
        So? The point remains the article specifically cites a situation where the adoption process fails, which directly contradicts the previous statement, and lends credence to the theory that the commenter hadn't actually read the majority of the article.
        336f5 11y ago
        > The point remains the article specifically cites a situation where the adoption process fails No, it doesn't. The article vaguely alludes to a third-hand description of the failure of a legal tactic which taken literally is nonsensical; and as far as I can tell, when those two people tried in the sensible standard manner used by everyone else (the manner in which the article is about), did succeed.
        Laaw 11y ago
        > No, it doesn't. Yes, it does. It literally has that, right there, in the text. As quoted, you are factually incorrect.
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    How about joint adoption of children and spousal privilege for two really obvious flaws that come off the top of my head. The other thing is it requires someone's actual parents to sever family ties. Removing someone's parents entirely from the next-of-kin hierarchy. You're also missing something very very important from the article: >They married 10 days later. After 52 years, marriage is “anti-climactic,” Novak said. But, he added, “psychologically, it makes you feel better. Like you’re a part of the human race.”
    - gwern 11y ago
      > The other thing is it requires someone's actual parents to sever family ties. Removing someone's parents entirely from the next-of-kin hierarchy. No, you don't. That's just more paperwork. You don't need to sever relationships any more than the adoptee needs to look up to the adopter as a father rather than lover. > You're also missing something very very important from the article: That's pretty weaksauce.
      - nommm-nommm 11y ago
        Oh right, feeling like you are being treated humanely and respectfully is "weaksauce." >No, you don't. That's just more paperwork. You don't need to sever relationships any more than the adoptee needs to look up to the adopter as a father rather than lover. Legal family relationship. From TFA: > First, his biological mother had to legally disown him. Meaning the mother isn't a legal next-of-kin anymore and also the reverse. So then you'd apparently have to have more legal paperwork to "fix" that I guess.... Mother would have to make sure her will/paperwork was perfect to not leave out child and child would make sure their will/paperwork was perfect so as to not leave out mother. One example If my mom died tomorrow my siblings and I would inherit her estate. If my mom had to disown me so I could be adopted by my spouse then the estate would go to my siblings only and not me. So my mom would have to first create a will and "add" me back in. Then I'd hope the siblings wouldn't try to challenge that in court or anything. After all that I still can't add my spouse (who is now legally my parent) to my health insurance! Sounds like a bum deal.
        11y ago
- antillean 11y ago
  People still make that argument now. SCOTUS decisions don't suddenly change everyone's mind.
  - erispoe 11y ago
    SCOTUS decisions don't change hearts and minds, that's true. But SCOTUS decisions tend to follow long-term changes in public opininion. Gay marriage wouldn't have passed 50 years ago. SCOTUS acts like a classic common law court: the law exists independently of the courts, in the people, and the task of the court is to discover it.
    - amyjess 11y ago
      Not necessarily. While SCOTUS legalized gay marriage after public support for it passed 50%, it wasn't until decades after SCOTUS legalized interracial marriage that public support for it passed 50%. xkcd has an interesting graph of this: https://xkcd.com/1431/ https://xkcd.com/1431/
      - erispoe 11y ago
        You are right. I don't think SCOTUS looks at gallup polls and decides to endorse anything that meets a 50% threshold. It's more about recognizing a change in opinion and a consensus in the making. Interracial marriage was not at 50% but firmly on the way up.
    - antillean 11y ago
      > SCOTUS acts like a classic common law court: the law exists independently of the courts, in the people, and the task of the court is to discover it I hope, for the sake of American democracy, that this just isn't true.
      - erispoe 11y ago
        Why? It takes more than 50% of expressed votes every two years to make a functionnal democracy.
- pfortuny 11y ago
  This is another issue where the definition of "right" is somewhat complicated. Does one really have the "right" to have a son? Does one really have the "right" to adopt a child? I mean, be it gay, straight, married or a widower, is there a "right" to become the parent of a child? I honestly think this deserves a greater reflection than a mere "but other people CAN, so anyone has to be able to also," which is the implicit reasoning behind gay adoption or general adoption policies in modern countries. Nothing to do, as i see it, with equality.
  - erose1 11y ago
    Did you read the article? It's not about gay people adopting children.
  - erispoe 11y ago
    You have a more articulate way than usual to package this classic of homophobia. But you miss the point, the article is not about that.
  - ska 11y ago
    This is another issue where the definition of "right" is somewhat complicated. It's more of an issue where you didn't read the article, and are talking about something irrelevant to its points. Presumably because you thought you knew what it was about from the title or a quick skim. What purpose does that serve?
DavidAdams 11y ago
I'm sure that in legal circles, there are a whole host of similar "law hacking" examples. This seems like a particular ingenious approach. I'd be interested to learn about other circumstances where laws are creatively misused to achieve noble ends. (The examples where the law is misused for nefarious ends are too numerous to mention).
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon
  - gburt 11y ago
    This reminds me of the tiny house movement that avoids building regulations w.r.t. minimize size and grid hookup by putting wheels on their semi-permanent houses.
    - jacquesm 11y ago
      It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing this for a very long time. There are also tax advantages to having wheels attached to your house, in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the dwelling.
      - masklinn 11y ago
        > It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing this for a very long time. For very different reasons, and theirs aren't semi-permanent. > in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the dwelling. Then again in plenty of places (at least in western europe) you must have a permanent residence, so a mobile dwelling (whether an RV or a boat) can only be a secondary residence.
  - corin_ 11y ago
    Also related to buildings, but in this case to avoid taxation - in the UK there was a "window tax", designed to be a progressive tax (the wealthier you are, the bigger your house, the more windows you have, the more tax you pay). To pay less tax, lots of people bricked up some of their windows so that the tax would go down without living in a smaller building. Now days that tax has been replaced in the UK by council tax, which is still progressive but based on house valuations rather than counting windows. You can still see some remnants of the tax avoidance, though, such as http://knowledgeoflondon.com/images/windowtax.jpg http://knowledgeoflondon.com/images/windowtax.jpg
gohrt 11y ago
The article doesn't mention adult adoption in Japan at all, which is strange. Japanese adult adoption (a centuries long-standing practice) was covered in the US news and HN in the past year.
- MatthewWilkes 11y ago
  Why would it? Japanese adult adoption isn't romantic in nature.
  - song 11y ago
    Not always, it's sometimes used by gay partners in Japan as an alternative to marriage since they cannot legally marry. It's exactly the same situation as the one described in this article. And like the article, it's not an ideal solution.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > Not always, it's sometimes used by gay partners in Japan as an alternative to marriage since they cannot legally marry. True but GP is talking about "a centuries long-standing practice".
- mc32 11y ago
  That's different though, that's done in order to "continue" the family line when there is no male heir to inherit a going concern, so while very interesting in its own way it's to address a different social pressure. Still, yes, very interesting.
- masklinn 11y ago
  The article is about LGBT adoptions for romantic purposes, as a legal replacement to unavailable legal unions. Japanese "son-in-law adoption" (mukoyōshi) is a question of business capability and name (brand) preservation, not a way to bypass a lack of legal protection in a romantic pairing.
yarrel 11y ago
This makes very clear the practical benefits of same-sex marriage and the real impact it has on people's lives. Whenever I encounter people being dismissive of same-sex marriage because it's just symbolic/a distraction/etc., these are the kind of examples I give to show how wrong they are.
LordKano 11y ago
This happened near where I live. A gay couple did an adoption but now they're father and son so it's not legal for them to marry. http://www.post-gazette.com/local/north/2015/10/09/Fox-Chapel-gay-couple-had-to-legalize-their-status-through-adoption-now-it-keeps-them-from-getting-married/stories/201510110112 http://www.post-gazette.com/local/north/2015/10/09/Fox-Chape...
- masklinn 11y ago
  I was going to mention adoption dissolution (which has been used by other couples in the same situation: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/28/newser/28064115/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/28/newser/...) but the article covers it: > when the couple petitioned Allegheny County Judge Lawrence O’Toole to dissolve the adoption this summer, he ruled the state’s adoption law didn’t allow him to do so. That's just sad, and they only just went the adoption route 2 years before same-sex marriage was legalised.
ethanpil 11y ago
Why is this article on hacker news? What does it have to do with this community? I am just wondering how it fits in to the vision of what HN is supposed to be. Or do I not understand what it is?
- DanBC 11y ago
  What do you think should be here? Why, specifically, do you think this doesn't fit?
  - ethanpil 11y ago
    I come here for news on cutting edge technology and startup culture, not social issues.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Searching for the word "gay", then ordering the results by time, then going to the earliest entries, shows many results for articles about homosexual experiences. These articles were being posted to HN seven years ago.
    - jccc 11y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. There are gay people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and there are gay people in these forums. I would guess that there might be a higher percentage of gay people on HN than in the general U.S. population. Issues like this one are deeply important to them, and people who know them (which is a growing demographic). In any case, HN is filled with submissions and comments on languages, platforms, and businesses that I really don't care much about, but their presence does not bother me.
      - ethanpil 11y ago
Mz 11y ago
I imagine this would be quite the headtrip for a lot of people to deal with: Adult adoption by gays and lesbians has only been quietly discussed, both in or outside the gay community, for fairly obvious reasons; there isn’t an easy way to tell your friends and family that the man or woman with whom you share a bed is, legally, your son or father, or your daughter or mother. I am glad we legalized gay marriage.

72 points by pmcpinto 11y ago

Not that long ago people tried to argue that marriage equality wasn't needed to protect basic rights of individuals involved. They just needed to use contracts/adoption/etc. This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.

gwern 11y ago
> This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was. I'm not sure what you mean. At no point does it indicate that the adoption tactic ever failed; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more than a change of paperwork. Based on this article, you would have to say that marriage equality wasn't needed to secure the basic rights like inheritance, hospital visitation, etc.
- GeorgeOrr 11y ago
  The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights. And after all the gymnastics, they and only they had to endure, they ended up with approximation of what heterosexuals were able to accomplish with a conversation at a Justice of the Peace. The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution." It only seems successful to those who didn't need to do it.
  - mfoy_ 11y ago
    Not to mention it's just plain dehumanizing.
  - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >they and only they had to endure Lets not pretend that gay marriage is the last marriage equality that will have to be fought for, even if the ones to come seem as crazy to use as gay marriage seemed to many of those who fought for interracial marriage.
    - LordKano 11y ago
      Three person marriage is likely next. It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > Three person marriage is likely next. > It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done. It actually hasn't; any two-party marriage uses the same infrastructure without problems, the differences are simply at the front door. Multiparty marriages need ground up redesign of the rights and privileges, which are all based on exclusive dyadic relationships. There's quite usable outlines of how the legal infrastructure might support many aspects of multiparty marriages (especially in terms of things like dissolution) in, e.g., the law of business partnerships, but the context and details of the rights and privileges tied to marriage are sufficiently different that there is a lot of work to do define even what a multiparty marriage would mean legally. Its not a simple equality step that can be addressed largely at the front door like interracial or even same-sex marriage.
        LordKano 11y ago
        "Equitable division of marital assets and liabilities." This doesn't require anything special. Legalizing same-sex marriage required changes on license forms, this will too.
        dragonwriter 11y ago
        > "Equitable division of marital assets and liabilities." > This doesn't require anything special. Right, and how to mechanically achieve this in multiparty relationships on dissolution is what I referred to as having a particularly good model in partnership law, because its done there a lot, and the wrinkles in how it works out have been pretty heavily hammered on over several centuries. The non-dissolution aspects of marital rights and privileges and how they would apply to multiparty relations (and whether existing explicit rules and legal presumptions built on the premise of a dyadic relationship work, or even make any sense, in multiparty relationships needs to be considered, area by area; for some aspects of this, again, partnership law probably has good models to follow as to how things might be generalized.) E.g., there's lots of things where spouses have either decisive rights or are necessarily included parties that must each consent, written based on the dyadic nature of existing marriage structure. Whether these generalize to every spouse having the same powers and requirements as a single spouse does now, or whether those powers require a majority of the members of the multiparty relationship, or some other rule in a multiparty case probably needs separate analysis for each of the areas.
  - peter303 11y ago
    I've seen it counted that marriage confers over 1000 contracts or rights. I dont know how may the other methods secure.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > I've seen it counted that marriage confers over 1000 contracts or rights Way over 1000 in fact, back in 2004, at the federal level alone, the GAO identified "1049 federal statutory provisions […] contingent on marital status or in which marital status is a factor" http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04353r.pdf http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04353r.pdf
  - gwern 11y ago
    > The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to approximate those rights. Now you are moving goalposts. First you were all 'look at how total a failure this is and how this is proof marriage is the only possible option'; when I point out that it worked out just fine for all the people who did it, now you're backpedaling to complaining about 'gymnastics'. And as gymnastics go, having a parent fill out a form, enduring a rubberstamp social worker visit, and filling out some more paperwork is hardly an Olympic-level feat; especially when one consider what this gets you (a clever legal hack to secure a very large set of legal rights that would be unobtainable otherwise for 40 years or more, going by the mentioned years). The surprising thing is that it wasn't more common. > The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution." The article details how this worked out quite well for them. I don't see much of a 'patchwork' or discussion of the limits, or how the variation was a serious problem. (If you read OP, the biggest problem described seemed to be a hypothetical legal conundrum about some incest laws that the lawyers were still arguing between themselves about.)
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  Military members' adult children receive no benefits. Consequently, a US military member who used this method may have secured certain visitation and inheritance rights, but would not have qualified their spouse for access to the base, base hospital, insurance, and many other things. Hell, no one using this method would be able to cover their adult partner (over age 26, now, variously 18 or 21 in the past) under company health insurance. They wouldn't have qualified for any tax benefits of marriage (or penalties, for that matter). Combining property in joint accounts or joint ownership was slightly easier, but still not as straightforward as it is for married couples. > At no point does it indicate that the adoption tactic ever failed The adoption technique did not fail in that it achieved what it intended to achieve (primarily the basic legal rights and access of family members). But it did not achieve a marriage substitute, as it did not give them access to everything that marriage entailed. > ; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more than a change of paperwork. It secured some of the rights, it did not secure all or anywhere near most of them.
- Laaw 11y ago
  Well, not to be pedantic, but the article actually does say the adoption tactic failed, at least once: > There had been an article in The Advocate about a couple in the Midwest who unsuccessfully tried to adopt each other in order to forge a legal bond.
  - 336f5 11y ago
    "adopting each other" is meaningless and the citation is vague. Some googling of The Advocate's website suggests this is probably a reference to Baker and McConnell, where the regular adoption did succeed: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/the-same-sex-couple-who-got-a-marriage-license-in-1971.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/the-same-sex-couple-who...
    - Laaw 11y ago
      So? The point remains the article specifically cites a situation where the adoption process fails, which directly contradicts the previous statement, and lends credence to the theory that the commenter hadn't actually read the majority of the article.
      - 336f5 11y ago
        > The point remains the article specifically cites a situation where the adoption process fails No, it doesn't. The article vaguely alludes to a third-hand description of the failure of a legal tactic which taken literally is nonsensical; and as far as I can tell, when those two people tried in the sensible standard manner used by everyone else (the manner in which the article is about), did succeed.
        Laaw 11y ago
        > No, it doesn't. Yes, it does. It literally has that, right there, in the text. As quoted, you are factually incorrect.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  How about joint adoption of children and spousal privilege for two really obvious flaws that come off the top of my head. The other thing is it requires someone's actual parents to sever family ties. Removing someone's parents entirely from the next-of-kin hierarchy. You're also missing something very very important from the article: >They married 10 days later. After 52 years, marriage is “anti-climactic,” Novak said. But, he added, “psychologically, it makes you feel better. Like you’re a part of the human race.”
  - gwern 11y ago
    > The other thing is it requires someone's actual parents to sever family ties. Removing someone's parents entirely from the next-of-kin hierarchy. No, you don't. That's just more paperwork. You don't need to sever relationships any more than the adoptee needs to look up to the adopter as a father rather than lover. > You're also missing something very very important from the article: That's pretty weaksauce.
    - nommm-nommm 11y ago
      Oh right, feeling like you are being treated humanely and respectfully is "weaksauce." >No, you don't. That's just more paperwork. You don't need to sever relationships any more than the adoptee needs to look up to the adopter as a father rather than lover. Legal family relationship. From TFA: > First, his biological mother had to legally disown him. Meaning the mother isn't a legal next-of-kin anymore and also the reverse. So then you'd apparently have to have more legal paperwork to "fix" that I guess.... Mother would have to make sure her will/paperwork was perfect to not leave out child and child would make sure their will/paperwork was perfect so as to not leave out mother. One example If my mom died tomorrow my siblings and I would inherit her estate. If my mom had to disown me so I could be adopted by my spouse then the estate would go to my siblings only and not me. So my mom would have to first create a will and "add" me back in. Then I'd hope the siblings wouldn't try to challenge that in court or anything. After all that I still can't add my spouse (who is now legally my parent) to my health insurance! Sounds like a bum deal.
      - 11y ago
antillean 11y ago
People still make that argument now. SCOTUS decisions don't suddenly change everyone's mind.
- erispoe 11y ago
  SCOTUS decisions don't change hearts and minds, that's true. But SCOTUS decisions tend to follow long-term changes in public opininion. Gay marriage wouldn't have passed 50 years ago. SCOTUS acts like a classic common law court: the law exists independently of the courts, in the people, and the task of the court is to discover it.
  - amyjess 11y ago
    Not necessarily. While SCOTUS legalized gay marriage after public support for it passed 50%, it wasn't until decades after SCOTUS legalized interracial marriage that public support for it passed 50%. xkcd has an interesting graph of this: https://xkcd.com/1431/ https://xkcd.com/1431/
    - erispoe 11y ago
      You are right. I don't think SCOTUS looks at gallup polls and decides to endorse anything that meets a 50% threshold. It's more about recognizing a change in opinion and a consensus in the making. Interracial marriage was not at 50% but firmly on the way up.
  - antillean 11y ago
    > SCOTUS acts like a classic common law court: the law exists independently of the courts, in the people, and the task of the court is to discover it I hope, for the sake of American democracy, that this just isn't true.
    - erispoe 11y ago
      Why? It takes more than 50% of expressed votes every two years to make a functionnal democracy.
pfortuny 11y ago
This is another issue where the definition of "right" is somewhat complicated. Does one really have the "right" to have a son? Does one really have the "right" to adopt a child? I mean, be it gay, straight, married or a widower, is there a "right" to become the parent of a child? I honestly think this deserves a greater reflection than a mere "but other people CAN, so anyone has to be able to also," which is the implicit reasoning behind gay adoption or general adoption policies in modern countries. Nothing to do, as i see it, with equality.
- erose1 11y ago
  Did you read the article? It's not about gay people adopting children.
- erispoe 11y ago
  You have a more articulate way than usual to package this classic of homophobia. But you miss the point, the article is not about that.
- ska 11y ago
  This is another issue where the definition of "right" is somewhat complicated. It's more of an issue where you didn't read the article, and are talking about something irrelevant to its points. Presumably because you thought you knew what it was about from the title or a quick skim. What purpose does that serve?

DavidAdams 11y ago

I'm sure that in legal circles, there are a whole host of similar "law hacking" examples. This seems like a particular ingenious approach. I'd be interested to learn about other circumstances where laws are creatively misused to achieve noble ends. (The examples where the law is misused for nefarious ends are too numerous to mention).

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon
- gburt 11y ago
  This reminds me of the tiny house movement that avoids building regulations w.r.t. minimize size and grid hookup by putting wheels on their semi-permanent houses.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing this for a very long time. There are also tax advantages to having wheels attached to your house, in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the dwelling.
    - masklinn 11y ago
      > It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing this for a very long time. For very different reasons, and theirs aren't semi-permanent. > in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the dwelling. Then again in plenty of places (at least in western europe) you must have a permanent residence, so a mobile dwelling (whether an RV or a boat) can only be a secondary residence.
- corin_ 11y ago
  Also related to buildings, but in this case to avoid taxation - in the UK there was a "window tax", designed to be a progressive tax (the wealthier you are, the bigger your house, the more windows you have, the more tax you pay). To pay less tax, lots of people bricked up some of their windows so that the tax would go down without living in a smaller building. Now days that tax has been replaced in the UK by council tax, which is still progressive but based on house valuations rather than counting windows. You can still see some remnants of the tax avoidance, though, such as http://knowledgeoflondon.com/images/windowtax.jpg http://knowledgeoflondon.com/images/windowtax.jpg

gohrt 11y ago

The article doesn't mention adult adoption in Japan at all, which is strange. Japanese adult adoption (a centuries long-standing practice) was covered in the US news and HN in the past year.

MatthewWilkes 11y ago
Why would it? Japanese adult adoption isn't romantic in nature.
- song 11y ago
  Not always, it's sometimes used by gay partners in Japan as an alternative to marriage since they cannot legally marry. It's exactly the same situation as the one described in this article. And like the article, it's not an ideal solution.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    > Not always, it's sometimes used by gay partners in Japan as an alternative to marriage since they cannot legally marry. True but GP is talking about "a centuries long-standing practice".
mc32 11y ago
That's different though, that's done in order to "continue" the family line when there is no male heir to inherit a going concern, so while very interesting in its own way it's to address a different social pressure. Still, yes, very interesting.
masklinn 11y ago
The article is about LGBT adoptions for romantic purposes, as a legal replacement to unavailable legal unions. Japanese "son-in-law adoption" (mukoyōshi) is a question of business capability and name (brand) preservation, not a way to bypass a lack of legal protection in a romantic pairing.

yarrel 11y ago

This makes very clear the practical benefits of same-sex marriage and the real impact it has on people's lives. Whenever I encounter people being dismissive of same-sex marriage because it's just symbolic/a distraction/etc., these are the kind of examples I give to show how wrong they are.

LordKano 11y ago

This happened near where I live. A gay couple did an adoption but now they're father and son so it's not legal for them to marry. http://www.post-gazette.com/local/north/2015/10/09/Fox-Chapel-gay-couple-had-to-legalize-their-status-through-adoption-now-it-keeps-them-from-getting-married/stories/201510110112 http://www.post-gazette.com/local/north/2015/10/09/Fox-Chape...

masklinn 11y ago
I was going to mention adoption dissolution (which has been used by other couples in the same situation: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/28/newser/28064115/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/28/newser/...) but the article covers it: > when the couple petitioned Allegheny County Judge Lawrence O’Toole to dissolve the adoption this summer, he ruled the state’s adoption law didn’t allow him to do so. That's just sad, and they only just went the adoption route 2 years before same-sex marriage was legalised.

ethanpil 11y ago

Why is this article on hacker news? What does it have to do with this community? I am just wondering how it fits in to the vision of what HN is supposed to be. Or do I not understand what it is?

DanBC 11y ago
What do you think should be here? Why, specifically, do you think this doesn't fit?
- ethanpil 11y ago
  I come here for news on cutting edge technology and startup culture, not social issues.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Searching for the word "gay", then ordering the results by time, then going to the earliest entries, shows many results for articles about homosexual experiences. These articles were being posted to HN seven years ago.
  - jccc 11y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. There are gay people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and there are gay people in these forums. I would guess that there might be a higher percentage of gay people on HN than in the general U.S. population. Issues like this one are deeply important to them, and people who know them (which is a growing demographic). In any case, HN is filled with submissions and comments on languages, platforms, and businesses that I really don't care much about, but their presence does not bother me.
    - ethanpil 11y ago

Mz 11y ago

I imagine this would be quite the headtrip for a lot of people to deal with: Adult adoption by gays and lesbians has only been quietly discussed, both in or outside the gay community, for fairly obvious reasons; there isn’t an easy way to tell your friends and family that the man or woman with whom you share a bed is, legally, your son or father, or your daughter or mother. I am glad we legalized gay marriage.