When people ask Liz McLean where her father is or what he does, she doesn’t mind telling them she has no idea and isn’t particularly curious.

‘A dad would be great just to be daddy’s little girl, but I’ve never thought that I’m missing anything,’ said McLean, a senior sociology and Spanish major, of her Minneapolis, Minn., childhood with her mothers, Luranne McLean and Barbara Kruesi.

Though McLean never felt she was missing out on family quality, she and her family did miss the 1,138 federal benefits, many of them regarding the family, available only to married – and therefore heterosexual – couples.

On Sept. 7, Vermont’s Supreme Court ruled that Janet Miller-Jenkins and Lisa Miller, two lesbian women who had a child together and later separated, should be treated as any heterosexual couple. The decision conflicted with a Virginia Supreme Court decision on the same case, which gave Miller, the biological mother, full custody rights of 3-year-old Isabella Miller-Jenkins.

When states’ highest courts issue conflicting rulings, the matter can go to the supreme court, whose ruling would create a precedent for all similar cases.

The Miller-Jenkins case is one of several in recent years facing the question of whether both parents in a homosexual relationship should and can be legally recognized parents.

In 2003, a Pennsylvania court ruled that a mother must pay child support to her former partner. In 2005, California recognized domestic partners, giving them all of the state’s rights and responsibilities – including parenthood rights – of heterosexual couples. Second-parent adoption has been approved in New York’s highest courts.

Though gay couples often draw up legal documents such as wills and power-of-attorney indicating both partners are equal parents, a family without second-parent adoption is still far less protected, said Courtney Joslin, senior staff attorney for the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

‘The harms are really to the child,’ Joslin said. ‘It’s vitally important from the child’s standpoint.’

In states where second-parent adoption is not available, couples often have to take small steps such as establishing joint bank accounts to help establish the partners and their children as a family, should they ever have to go to court, said Casey Sprock, a partner with Baldwin & Sutphen law firm in Syracuse and an adjunct professor at the College of Law.

If a child’s second-parent dies or is unable to work, children who are not adopted could lose Social Security benefits, health insurance, and workers’ compensation, Joslin said.

When Kruesi died from complications from Hodgkin’s disease in 1991, Luranne McLean received only $250 from the government to help pay for Kruesi’s funeral. Their son, Brian, 14 at the time, received his benefits. Liz McLean, who is not Kruesi’s biological child, received nothing.

‘Elizabeth got nothing,’ Luranne McLean said. ‘She wasn’t even acknowledged as being part of our family. Both kids were hurting and both kids lost a parent. It was just irritating that the government only recognized one.’

McLean formally adopted Brian Kruesi four years after Barbara’s death. Second-parent adoption is recognized in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located. Neither woman had considered it when the children were born, McLean said. In fact, she said, she had been advised to not adopt her son right away because it would help with Social Security and college funding.

Family court pressed McLean to establish separate funds for each child’s needs, and required a $10,000 bond as a promise that McLean wouldn’t take Brian Kruesi’s Social Security payments.

‘It felt kind of insulting,’ Luranne McLean said. ‘We’d been a family since day one and I wasn’t going to change things like that.’

McLean fought both issues, and the court waived the bond – the first time in Minnesota – and allowed McLean to keep the same records for both Liz and Brian.

‘We are a family. I didn’t want to have to say, ‘Sorry, Brian, I can’t buy that for you, I don’t have that checkbook with me,” McLean said.

Problems don’t arise only when one parent dies. When partners separate, as in the Jenkins-Miller case, children can face to lose something larger than financial benefits – a parent. Without an adoption, there is no guarantee the non-biological parent will be allowed visitation or custody rights.

When senior graphic arts and Spanish major Jenn Dawes’ mother, Cris Young, and her partner, Charlotte Waltham, separated, Dawes was ‘devastated.’ Waltham had been as much as parent as her biological mother, she said.

‘It’s been really sad since they broke up, not being able to keep in touch like that,’ she said. ‘I was devastated. It was really hard because if your parents split up, at least you know you get to see both of them.’

Waltham and Young were co-parents to Dawes and her older brother, John Dawes, Jr., for more than a decade. Though Waltham had not adopted either of the children – Dawes’ father still retained his parental right – Dawes considered Waltham a third parent, she said.

Both Young and Luranne McLean said they found themselves alone during their parenting process. Most gay men and women with children had them from previous heterosexual relationships, McLean said.

Only now are many of Advertising Department Chairwoman Amy Falkner’s gay friends starting families, she said.

‘We were kind of at the forefront of this,’ she said. ‘When we first adopted, our friends thought we were nuts. I was most surprised at our gay friends. It was something they never even thought about.’

Falkner and Toni Guidice, her partner of 19 years, adopted daughters Maya and Alix Falkner-Guidice through second-parent adoption. New York is one of seven states plus the District of Columbia where statutes or appellate courts have permitted second-parent adoption. Eighteen other states have recognized the adoptions at some trial level, Joslin said.

There are also 23,632 lesbians and 26,890 gay men raising children in New York state, according to the 2000 Census.

The Jenkins-Miller case and others could provide the spark needed for other states to begin to discuss the issue and how domestic partners should be treated should the issue ever come to court, Sprock said.

‘Other states really want to be proactive and set their own rules and regulations regarding these actions before people from other states come in and raise the question,’ Sprock said. ‘It’s not individual cases, but the states’ actions that cause change.’

The families all said they support full parental rights for gay and lesbian parents, and would recommend second-parent adoption.

‘You should do it even if you think for one minute that someone in the other person’s family would fight for him,’ said Luranne McLean, who has heard many cases of non-biological parents losing custody of children they had raised from infancy.

Just as heterosexual, unmarried parents still have the right to see their children after a split, gay parents should maintain visitation rights, Young said.

‘It’s legal. It’s a family,’ she said. ‘Why not extend that right to every partner?’

‘It’s just heartbreaking to hear that someone will get totally cut off just because there’s no precedent,’ Falkner said.

Dawes has written countless papers on gay marriage, and said growing up in a family with two parents is all that matters, regardless of whether those parents are two fathers, two mothers or one of each.

Parenting rights consistently remain in the top three percent of concerns, said Falkner, who has done research on gay and lesbian families.

‘There’s no safety net. There’s nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s like a trapeze with no net.’

Published on September 21, 2005 at 12:00 pm