California courts familiar with gay parent issues
| Gay rights lawyer Jon W. Davidson (Los Angeles Times / April 5, 2013) |
By Maura Dolan
SAN FRANCISCO -- When the California Supreme Court struck down a same-sex marriage ban in 2008, the majority ruling reflected a series of decisions the court had already reached in disputes involving gay parents.
Gay rights lawyers said this week that those cases were critical to the court’s historic marriage ruling — later partly overturned by Proposition 8 -- and lamented the fact that theU.S. Supreme Court has little experience in dealing with gay family litigation.
“The U.S. Supreme Court has never decided a lesbian or gay parenting case,” said Jon W. Davidson, legal director of Lambda Legal. “And it’s really important for them to be understanding that same-sex couples have children ….. and to be thinking about actual children, as opposed to hypothetical children.”
In one case, California’s high court considered the parental rights of a woman who donated her eggs to her partner, who was artificially inseminated and gave birth to twins. The gestational mother was infertile, and the genetic mother had a diseased uterus.
That case brought to the court’s attention the myriad ways gay couples were having children.
One same-sex male couple each donated sperm to a