
The Lost History of Gay Adult Adoption - pmcpinto
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/magazine/the-lost-history-of-gay-adult-adoption.html?mod=e2this&_r=0
======
DavidAdams
I'm sure that in legal circles, there are a whole host of similar "law
hacking" examples. This seems like a particular ingenious approach. I'd be
interested to learn about other circumstances where laws are creatively
misused to achieve noble ends. (The examples where the law is misused for
nefarious ends are too numerous to mention).

~~~
vezzy-fnord
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drzyma%C5%82a's_wagon)

~~~
gburt
This reminds me of the tiny house movement that avoids building regulations
w.r.t. minimize size and grid hookup by putting wheels on their semi-permanent
houses.

~~~
jacquesm
It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing
this for a very long time. There are also tax advantages to having wheels
attached to your house, in plenty of places that means you're not paying
property tax for the dwelling.

~~~
masklinn
> It's not exactly a tiny house movement invention, the Roma have been doing
> this for a very long time.

For very different reasons, and theirs aren't semi-permanent.

> in plenty of places that means you're not paying property tax for the
> dwelling.

Then again in plenty of places (at least in western europe) you must have a
permanent residence, so a mobile dwelling (whether an RV or a boat) can only
be a secondary residence.

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LordKano
This happened near where I live. A gay couple did an adoption but now they're
father and son so it's not legal for them to marry.

[http://www.post-gazette.com/local/north/2015/10/09/Fox-
Chape...](http://www.post-gazette.com/local/north/2015/10/09/Fox-Chapel-gay-
couple-had-to-legalize-their-status-through-adoption-now-it-keeps-them-from-
getting-married/stories/201510110112)

~~~
masklinn
I was going to mention adoption dissolution (which has been used by other
couples in the same situation:
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/28/newser/...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/05/28/newser/28064115/))
but the article covers it:

> when the couple petitioned Allegheny County Judge Lawrence O’Toole to
> dissolve the adoption this summer, he ruled the state’s adoption law didn’t
> allow him to do so.

That's just sad, and they only just went the adoption route 2 years before
same-sex marriage was legalised.

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yarrel
This makes very clear the practical benefits of same-sex marriage and the real
impact it has on people's lives.

Whenever I encounter people being dismissive of same-sex marriage because it's
just symbolic/a distraction/etc., these are the kind of examples I give to
show how wrong they are.

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Mz
I imagine this would be quite the headtrip for a lot of people to deal with:

 _Adult adoption by gays and lesbians has only been quietly discussed, both in
or outside the gay community, for fairly obvious reasons; there isn’t an easy
way to tell your friends and family that the man or woman with whom you share
a bed is, legally, your son or father, or your daughter or mother._

I am glad we legalized gay marriage.

------
gohrt
The article doesn't mention adult adoption in Japan at all, which is strange.
Japanese adult adoption (a centuries long-standing practice) was covered in
the US news and HN in the past year.

~~~
MatthewWilkes
Why would it? Japanese adult adoption isn't romantic in nature.

~~~
song
Not always, it's sometimes used by gay partners in Japan as an alternative to
marriage since they cannot legally marry. It's exactly the same situation as
the one described in this article.

And like the article, it's not an ideal solution.

~~~
masklinn
> Not always, it's sometimes used by gay partners in Japan as an alternative
> to marriage since they cannot legally marry.

True but GP is talking about "a centuries long-standing practice".

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GeorgeOrr
Not that long ago people tried to argue that marriage equality wasn't needed
to protect basic rights of individuals involved. They just needed to use
contracts/adoption/etc.

This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.

~~~
gwern
> This is a great article to remind us how bogus that argument was.

I'm not sure what you mean. At no point does it indicate that the adoption
tactic ever failed; in fact, the article seems to be at pains to show that
adoption routinely and reliably secured most or all of the rights that
marriage would have, and swapping adoption for marriage now is little more
than a change of paperwork. Based on this article, you would have to say that
marriage equality _wasn 't_ needed to secure the basic rights like
inheritance, hospital visitation, etc.

~~~
GeorgeOrr
The article details the gymnastics required, required only of gay couples, to
approximate those rights.

And after all the gymnastics, they and only they had to endure, they ended up
with approximation of what heterosexuals were able to accomplish with a
conversation at a Justice of the Peace.

The article details the patchwork quilt of rights, the limits, the variation
among States, that resulted from this sort of "solution."

It only seems successful to those who didn't need to do it.

~~~
Lawtonfogle
>they and only they had to endure

Lets not pretend that gay marriage is the last marriage equality that will
have to be fought for, even if the ones to come seem as crazy to use as gay
marriage seemed to many of those who fought for interracial marriage.

~~~
LordKano
Three person marriage is likely next.

It avoids incest taboos and the groundwork has already been done.

~~~
adevine
I think this is wrong. As Dan Savage pointed out, heterosexuals had ALREADY
changed marriage long before the gays came along. Forgive the bluntness, but
marriage used to basically be a property transaction where a woman was
transferred from her family to her husband. Long ago, though, marriage in the
US has legally been viewed as a merge of equals. In fact, ALL states AFAIK had
already gotten rid of parts of their laws where husbands had different
rights/responsibilities from wives. Allowing gay marriage was just replacing
husband or wife with "spouse" in any legal document.

With 3 party marriage, the vast majority of laws related to financial
transactions would fundamentally have to change. Some simple examples 1\.
Survivor benefits: If someone is in a >2 person marriage, does that mean all
of their spouses can continue to collect survivor benefits until the last
person dies? 2\. Tax-free inheritance: Similar to the above, but does a >2
person marriage mean everyone gets tax free inheritance? 3\. Healthcare
benefits: Could you put 5 spouses on one employee-sponsored health plan? 4\.
Tax laws: Tax laws would need a total rewrite because all brackets/amounts
just support a single person or a 2-person marriage.

>2 person marriage has huge legal and financial implications that gay marriage
did not.

~~~
LordKano
_1\. Survivor benefits: If someone is in a >2 person marriage, does that mean
all of their spouses can continue to collect survivor benefits until the last
person dies?_

Survivor benefits continue as long as there is a surviving spouse. It doesn't
matter if there are 1 or 3.

 _2\. Tax-free inheritance: Similar to the above, but does a >2 person
marriage mean everyone gets tax free inheritance?_

Every surviving participant in the marriage inherits tax free. Just like now.

 _3\. Healthcare benefits: Could you put 5 spouses on one employee-sponsored
health plan?_

Yes.

 _4\. Tax laws: Tax laws would need a total rewrite because all brackets
/amounts just support a single person or a 2-person marriage._

Married or Single are the current choices. That wouldn't be any different. It
would actually incentivize multiple person marriage.

~~~
adevine
And your answers are fundamentally why >2 person marriage isn't coming anytime
soon. All of these solutions are basically break the entire slew of existing
financial setups around marriage. Do you think a company would be willing to
put 5 married people on the same spousal health plan? Do you think Social
Security is going to be OK with 1 person's benefits potentially outliving them
for decades as they carry on to multiple spouses?

>2 person marriage is fundamentally different from existing marriage laws in a
way gay marriage is not.

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ethanpil
Why is this article on hacker news? What does it have to do with this
community? I am just wondering how it fits in to the vision of what HN is
supposed to be. Or do I not understand what it is?

~~~
DanBC
What do you think should be here? Why, specifically, do you think this doesn't
fit?

~~~
ethanpil
I come here for news on cutting edge technology and startup culture, not
social issues.

~~~
jccc
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

 _On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one 's intellectual curiosity._

There are gay people in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and there are gay
people in these forums. I would guess that there might be a higher percentage
of gay people on HN than in the general U.S. population. Issues like this one
are deeply important to them, and people who know them (which is a growing
demographic).

In any case, HN is filled with submissions and comments on languages,
platforms, and businesses that I really don't care much about, but their
presence does not bother me.

~~~
ethanpil
I just didn't think it fit the profile. I didn't downvote nor complain, just
asked what the justification was.

Wasn't hostile, but my inquiry has produced some downvotes. Go figure.

~~~
jccc
For what it's worth, you didn't get a downvote from me.

I would just point out however that questioning a topic's presence on a forum
could easily be perceived to be hostility toward that topic. You might or
might not know that on HN gay-related and other not-strictly-tech topics have
come up on occasion that inevitably trigger queries like yours (some overtly
hostile), and most likely the opposition you are experiencing comes from
readers who have become tired of the routine.

