'The notion that I should expose my family to the whims of the homophobic justice system in order to protect it from the homophobic justice system made my head spin.' TeaMichelle writes
The author in 2014. Photo: Courtesy of the author When my ex and I got engaged back in 2013, gay marriage was not yet a thing. “Why bother?” friends asked, concerned that we were embarrassing ourselves with a meaningless mimicry of actual marriage and spending a bucket of cash in the process. “Weddings are romantic!” I insisted. “I like big gestures. I like rituals. I like big dresses and parties.” All true, but there was another reason: I was scared.
Nesta Johnson, a family-law attorney with the National Center for Lesbian Rights, empathizes with this feeling — “Parents should not have to adopt their own children,” Johnson told me recently — but NCLR nonetheless “strongly encourages nonbiological, non-adoptive parents to obtain a court order recognizing their parentage, if possible.” This could take the form of an adoption order, Johnson said, or a “parentage judgment,” the gender-neutral term for what you might know as a paternity judgment.
On the day the Dobbs ruling and Thomas’s dystopian musings were made public, my sister called: “Do you think you should adopt Atticus?” The notion that I should expose my family to the whims of the homophobic justice system in order to protect it from the homophobic justice system made my head spin. I wasn’t yet convinced this was a path I had to take. I knew that both my ex and our sperm donor would never interfere with or challenge the right to my child.