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LAW URGES RIGHTS FOR GAYS, UNMARRIED

By David B. Caruso, The Associated Press, Reported in Las Vegas Review-Journal, 12-5-02

PHILADELPHIA - U.S. divorce and child custody laws need to be updated to extend rights to gay couples and unmarried parents, an influential judicial think tank says.

The American Law Institute, an independent association of lawyers and judges that has wielded an extraordinary influence over American legal practices since it's founding in 1923, spent 10 years evaluating family law before publishing its findings in May. Among its' suggestions:

• A person's sexual orientation should not be considered by courts in custody matters.
• Homosexual couples should have to make alimony or child-support payments if they split up.
• Unmarried heterosexual couples who break up after long relationships should fall under traditional divorce laws, especially if they own joint property or have children.

In the months since the report was published, the institute has been bombarded with e-mails calling it everything from "a great threat to the family" to "Marxists" and "greedy lawyers."

The report's principal author, Arizona State University law professor Ira Mark Ellman, said the goal was to close holes in family law that have left judges guessing as to how to deal with nontraditional families.

"There has obviously been much more tolerance of those relationships, even much more than a decade ago," Ellman said.  "We are only saying that the law should catch up."

The work has been assailed by conservatives as an assault on marriage.

Joshua Baker, a staff attorney for the Marriage Law Project at The Catholic University of America, said creating legal rules governing the breakup of gay relationships gives them a status equivalent to marriage that most states do not currently allow.

"We have some serious misgivings about whether the law should recognize domestic partnerships at all," he said.

Oklahoma state Rep. Bill Graves, a Republican who has filed bills that would bar his state from recognizing same-sex unions made in other states, said giving gay relationships legal standing condones "totally illegitimate" behavior.

"I think we ought to be trying to legislate in a manner that will protect the family as we have known it for thousands of years in civilization," he said.  "Homosexuals, in their community, have what they would call families, but I believe that those types of families are fairly destructive."

It is unclear whether the institute's report will have much effect on state lawmakers.  Proposals to repeal laws criminalizing homosexual sex acts, give same-sex partners inheritance rights and extend health benefits to the partners of gay employees have stalled in many states.

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