Georgia yesterday became the latest state to have an active marriage equality lawsuit — and as in so many states, parents and prospective parents are among the plaintiffs.
Lambda Legal filed the lawsuit on behalf of three couples and one surviving spouse. Christopher Inniss and Shelton Stroman have a nine-year-old son. Michael Bishop and Shane Thomas have a five-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter. The third couple, Rayshawn Chandler and Avery Chandler, do not yet have children but plan to do so. (The other plaintiff, Jennifer Sisson, recently lost her spouse, Pamela Drenner, to ovarian cancer.)
Lambda Legal has fuller profiles of the plaintiffs, and the Georgia Voice has a long interview with Bishop and Thomas, in which Thomas explains, “When you hold that baby in your arms and you realize you’re a parent and that you have to protect that child, it really comes down to what we feel like are equal rights for us as parents.”
In other southern news, the Family Equality Council and COLAGE filed a “Voice of Children” amicus brief in the federal lawsuit challenging Virginia’s ban on marriage for same-sex couples. The brief features the perspectives of children and young adults raised by LGBT parents, and follows similar briefs filed in pending cases in Nevada, Hawaii, Utah and Oklahoma, and in the U.S. Supreme Court cases ruled on last June. The children’s words are passionate and poignant. I particularly like the unvarnished honesty of this one from Sarah Gogin:
[M]y high school experience was like many other hormonal teen girls’ high school experiences. It sucked. Acne, hormones, boys, college, SATs, musicals, proms, sporting tournaments. You name it; I went through it — with my dads’ support every step of the way.
Not all same-sex couples have or want kids — and not all parents want to marry, of course. To say that they should is to fall prey to our opponents’ argument that marriage is primarily about having children. I just love, however, that we are flipping our opponents’ “think of the harm to children” argument against marriage equality on its head by showing the harm to our children from inequality (a strategy I’ve been writing about since California’s Prop 8 passed in 2008).
