RALEIGH – Today the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation formally amended a 2012 lawsuit seeking to overturn North Carolina’s ban on second parent adoptions to also include claims challenging the state’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples after the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina today granted a motion to amend the lawsuit. The case, Fisher-Borne v. Smith, was filed in Greensboro last year by the ACLU and ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation on behalf of six same-sex couples and their children. On July 12, the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office said it would not oppose the move to amend the lawsuit.
“It’s very heartening that we will now be able to tell the stories of these six loving families and explain the countless ways in which so many parents and their children are harmed by North Carolina’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples,” said Chris Brook, Legal Director for the ACLU of North Carolina Legal Foundation. “The state’s refusal to grant legal recognition to families headed by same-sex couples has created an unending list of dilemmas, from the momentous to the mundane, that deprives loving families of the security and legal protections that they deserve. We look forward to making our arguments before the court, as well continuing a dialogue with the people of North Carolina as to why the rights and responsibilities that come with marriage should not be denied to loving and committed couples simply because they are gay or lesbian.”
The amended complaint enumerates many of the ways North Carolina’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples harms the six families involved in the case. “Excluding same-sex couples from marriage serves only to harm the children raised by lesbian and gay couples by denying their families significant benefits and by branding their families as inferior and less deserving of respect and, thus, encouraging private bias and discrimination,” the complaint reads.
Marriage would help same-sex couples protect their children by ensuring that all children in the family are covered if one partner lacks health insurance, that families will stay together and children will not be torn from the only home they’ve known if something should happen to the biological or legally recognized parent, and that either parent will be allowed to make medical decisions or be able to be by their child’s bedside if one of their children is hospitalized.
The change in the ACLU’s lawsuit comes weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in another ACLU case, United States v. Windsor, which found that the federal Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage as between one man and one woman was unconstitutional.
“Under DOMA, same-sex married couples have their lives burdened, by reason of government decree, in visible and public ways,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority in Windsor, adding that creating a “second-tier” status for same-sex couples “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects … [a]nd it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples. The law in questions makes it even more difficult for the children to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family and its concord with other families in their community and in their daily lives.”
The U.S. District Court order allowing the amended complaint is available here.