NEW ORLEANS — A same-sex couple in California has won a federal court ruling that their adopted son’s Louisiana birth certificate must bear the names of both adoptive fathers.
The facts are so clear that no trial is needed, U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey wrote.
Louisiana’s Office of Vital Records must give full faith and credit to the New York State court in which Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith of San Diego adopted the boy, he ruled Monday. The office had refused to issue a birth certificate listing both as the boy’s legal parents. The state could appeal the decision.
Adar and Smith say they have practical and emotional reasons for wanting both of their names on the birth certificate of the boy, identified only as “J.C. A.-S.”
Because Smith’s name wasn’t on the document, his employer initially refused to enroll the child on his insurance, Smith wrote. Smith, an accountant, is the family’s breadwinner.
The administrator eventually agreed to cover the boy, but “I am forced to go through this process each and every year” to keep him insured, Smith wrote.
“As an adopted child myself, I understand the need a child has to feel like he or she belongs,” Smith wrote. “I remember as a child wanting to see my own birth certificate and to see my parents listed because it gave me a sense of belonging.”
Adar also said the family often travels, and — because J. is black and they are white — an airline worker once stopped them, thinking that they were kidnapping the child.
J. was born about eight weeks prematurely in Shreveport, in 2005. He spent his first month in the hospital, and weighed 5 pounds when his mother gave him to Adar and Smith that December, Adar said.
Their adoption was made final on April 27, 2006, their lawsuit states.
Refusing to name both fathers on the birth certificate “singles out unmarried same-sex couples and their adoptive children for unequal treatment for the improper purpose of making them unequal to everyone else,” said the lawsuit filed by Regina Matthews of New Orleans and Kenneth Upton of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Inc. of Dallas.
Louisiana law does not let two unmarried people adopt a child together, regardless of sex, wrote Carol Haynes, representing the state health department and registrar Darlene Smith.
The judge wrote that Louisiana law requires a new certificate when it gets an adoption decree, and the law does not include any limits or restrictions.
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