From: "Bill Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 1994 11:27:01 EST

Others have addressed some of the questions about legal distinctions 
between gays and straights, but I would add the following:

Although any two persons may purchase property together, certain 
legal protections apply when the persons are married, including 
rights in various states that preclude a person from transferring the 
property or trying to disinherit a spouse.

The inheritancy laws are a real problem--I suspect several persons 
reading this message do not have wills, health care surrogates, 
powers of attorney, etc., which would allow their partner to not be 
dispossessed, prevented from visiting them in the hospital, 
making health care decisions, etc., should the person be in 
an accident.  The law's presumption for spouses is meant to protect 
us from our procrastination, avoidance of considering death, etc.

Even with those documents, one of my AIDS clinic clients was denied 
permission to have his lover's body released from the coroner because 
our statutes do not clearly authorize these documents to permit 
decisions to be made about funeral arrangements.  Although we 
eventually got the body released through threats of creative 
litigation, it is not clear we would have been successful in court, 
and it was clearly a significant trauma to the person's partner.

With adoptions, as I have previously stated, Florida and New 
Hampshire flatly prohibit homosexuals from adopting.  Although some 
states provide preferences which disadvantage single persons, gays 
and lesbians of course cannot do anything about changing their single 
status, which raises the real dilemmas in adoption law.  In most 
states, we cannot jointly adopt children like heterosexuals.  We 
cannot adopt our partners' children unlike heterosexuals.  This 
inability results in our being unable to obtain the legal protections 
necessary to continue contact with children when our relationships 
dissolve.  As one appellate court told the partner of a lesbian who 
sought visitation with her ex-lover's biological child whom she had 
helped raise, she was a"biological stranger" to the child and thus, 
without rights.

In litigating cases for PWA's and lesbigays, I see these distinctions 
causing real and siginificant harm.  Some of the issues we advocate 
for in the lesbigay civil rights movement are symbolic, of 
direct relevance to only small numbers of persons, or even esoteric 
(which doesn't mean that they shouldn't be fought). These issues are 
real and affect us and our brothers and sisters on a daily basis, 
however.

Bill Adams
[email-masked]