Norman MacArthur and Bill Novak, father and son, though not biologically, will soon be husband and … whatever, reports the Patch of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.That's the problem with pendulum swings. The 'domestic partner' law might have been stable, except it ran into places that refused to grant any status at all. So first they had to 'adopt' a ridiculous legal fiction, and now we're going to radically alter the institution of marriage for a while.
The pair, both in their 70s, have been together for 50 years and registered in New York City as domestic partners in 1994. But when they moved to Pennsylvania, they discovered their domestic partnership wasn’t recognized, and legalized same-sex marriage was nowhere on the horizon.
Needing to take care of estate-planning issues, the pair pursued a novel legal approach. Novak adopted MacArthur in 2000. The fact their parents were deceased removed any legal objection.
"Father" "Marries" "Son"
I suppose this represents a sort of progress, since what they are doing is more like marriage than it is like being father and son:
Adoption makes sense to me as a legal way to create a permanent family relationship. I'd be happy to create a new word that achieved this result without connoting either the parent-child relationship or any particular sexual practices. I regret that we spend so energy scrutinizing people's decision about whom to include in their households, beyond a basic need to make sure no minors are being placed in much higher risk than they were already.
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps I'm soured by the hostility the commune-like arrangements often suffer from municipal governments or local associations that are concerned about preserving a "single-family" neighborhood. It gets people into quarrels about what a "family" is that often strike me as impertinent. It's understandable, I suppose, when a "family" may be three or four loosely associated roommates, but then that's starting to apply equally to a lot of casual, temporary marriages with kids of vague provenance and shifting custody.
I'd be happy to create a new word that achieved this result without connoting either the parent-child relationship or any particular sexual practices.
ReplyDeleteHe's not heavy: he's my blood-brother. Fair enough. It's a solution with a fair amount of precedent in ancient Anglo-Saxon (or Viking) law.
It's understandable, I suppose, when a "family" may be three or four loosely associated roommates, but then that's starting to apply equally to a lot of casual, temporary marriages with kids of vague provenance and shifting custody.
I have a friend in New Orleans who tells me that, technically, he and his (male, heterosexual) roommate qualify as 'domestic partners' under the law there. I'm not sure if he's right about that, but it's an amusing concept.
But, I mean, young people form temporary 'households' with room-mates all the time. We don't make them pretend to be father and son, or sisters, or whatever. That's the kind of thing you write comedies about, not the kind of thing you'd actually do to people.
And, really, two non-sexual friends might want to live together for their whole lives. They might want to share property, or inherit. That's fine. None of that is a problematic issue at all.
Couldn't you do it already through incorporation?
ReplyDeleteIncorporation addresses some business issues well, especially the limitation of liability and the definition of authority over assets, but it doesn't adapt itself at all well to the issues that come up in family law.
ReplyDeleteWith enormous effort, it is possible to set up workarounds for things like insurance, inheritance, power of attorney, visiting rights, and so on for unmarried people, but they're clunky and unreliable. People unfortunately find in emergencies that some new category has come up in which they need to be treated as next of kin but are not.
It was interesting to see how some of this played out in my old Houston neighborhood when we got together to revise the restrictive covenants. Most people had an instinctive aversion to losing the single-family residence requirement, but it gradually dawned on them that we had a lot of cohabiting couples whom everyone had been used to thinking of as "married" and therefore legally one family. Oh, no! Do we suddenly have to start auditing people's technical marital status? If they have young people in the house, can we assume they're children of the marriage? What if they're 22? 65? Are they just friends, staying there for convenience? Who's on the real estate title? Are they cousins, in-laws? Is this really just a household of three guys who met each other in school and now want to share expenses? Are they gay? Do we care? (Our neighborhood, being reasonably safe and presentable and convenient to downtown but with awful schools, was attractive to couples without kids and therefore to gay couples.)
Hmm. Maybe if you could nominate a person (or a group of persons already related as next of kin) as your legal next of kin, that would work.
ReplyDelete