LGBT Book & Video Blog

For many same-sex couples, one of the primary motivations for getting married is to gain legal protections for our children. Nancy Polikoff, professor of law at American University Washington College of Law, cautions us, however, that we should not tie parenthood and marriage too tightly. "For the last 40 years," she says, "the development of the law has been to equalize the status of children born to married and unmarried parents ... . We were able to make enormous gains on behalf of same-sex parents and their children in that context, without marriage on the radar screen at all."

While marriage should be an option for all, she believes, it should not be a requirement. Opposite-sex couples have their parental status protected whether or not they are married, she notes, and by and large their children turn out fine. Research has shown, too, that children of same-sex couples have also been doing well with unmarried parents. "That's what we say in every custody case, that's what we say every time somebody says we shouldn't be able to adopt children."

In Polikoff's Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law (Beacon: 2008), she further explores why marriage is not sufficient and should not be necessary to protect all families. She admits that the book is "somewhat unusual" for her in that it focuses on couples and adult relationships and discusses parenting only as a subset of that.

She has spent most of her 30-year career, however, on issues specific to lesbian and gay parents and their children. In her last year of undergraduate work, 1972, she met the first person identified to her as a lesbian mother. The woman had just lost custody of her children after coming out and divorcing her husband. When Polikoff entered law school, her first law review article (published with Nan Hunter) was about lesbian mothers in custody cases. Her interest in the topic has never wavered, she says, although she has worked on other issues. Becoming a mother herself and watching many of her friends and colleagues doing the same has reinforced her commitment.

Marriage and parenthood: A talk with Nancy Polikoff
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