Pioneer Press: Marriage equality? Lesbian married parents actually aren’t treated the same, legally, as straight couples. Will it change?

Half of married gay women in Minnesota are forced to adopt their own children under Minnesota law.

That inequity — man-woman married couples don’t have this hurdle — is a paradox, since same-sex married couples are supposed to have the same rights in the state. In 2013, same-sex marriage became legal.

The legal inequity is the result of other laws — with gender-specific language — that were never changed when same-sex marriage was legalized. Outside of gay-rights advocates and the affected parents themselves, the situation appears to have received little public attention, until now.

Several Democrats at the state Capitol are leading a push to change state law, but it’s unclear if it will pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

WHAT’S THE ISSUE?

Here’s the inequity:

• Straight couple: Woman becomes pregnant. Woman gives birth. Both she and her husband are immediately the legal parents. This is true whether she was impregnated with his sperm or a donor’s.
• Lesbian couple: Woman becomes pregnant. Woman gives birth. She is immediately the legal parent. Her wife is not. Her wife must adopt the child, a process that can take a year.

It took 11 months for Nikki Graf to become the legal mother of her daughter, Logan, by adopting her. Her wife, Whitney, is Logan’s birthmother.

The adoption process meant Nikki asked friends to write character references for her to a court, and she had to be fingerprinted.

“I had to prove that I’m not a sexual predator,” said Nikki Graf, who owns a house with Whitney on St. Paul’s East Side. “It started to become demeaning.”

And not free. The roughly $1,500 in legal fees wiped out the savings the couple had squirreled away for Logan. And those expenses followed the other expense that came with having a child: Whitney’s artificial insemination from an anonymous sperm donor.

WAITING GAME

But mostly, Nikki Graf said the 8 months that her daughter was not entirely legally hers created some anxious moments.

The Grafs, who met playing women’s football for the Minnesota Vixen — Whitney played cornerback, Nikki linebacker — had been legally married for nearly two years when Logan was born.

“My name is on her birth certificate, but I didn’t have legal custody under the law,” Nikki said. “My fear was that if something happened to Whitney, I would lose my wife and my daughter at the same time.

One tense moment came when Logan’s dairy allergy first revealed itself. Nikki was home alone with her and rushed her to the ER. When she told the admitting nurse that Logan’s other parent was a woman who was the biological parent, the nurse paused, and asked her straight up: “Do you actually have legal rights to this child?” In the rush to get out of the house, she hadn’t brought the birth certificate.

“I said ‘Yes,'” Nikki recalled. “What else could I say?” It all worked out, but Graf said the hours she spent that day in the hospital were filled not only with worry about Logan, but also about whether she would be allowed to take her home.

‘LOGAN’S LAW’

“What is happening should not be happening,” said Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, one of the architects of the law that legalized gay marriage in Minnesota.

It was pretty simple: the state’s marriage law was reworded to remove the definition of marriage as “opposite sex” and to replace words like man and woman with “person” and  bride and groom with “spouse.”

Lawmakers knew there were other gender-specific references sprinkled throughout Minnesota statutes, but rather than monkey around with language in dozens of places, they added a general statement that they thought would cover it. It hasn’t.

“We thought everything else would be taken care of,” said Dibble. “But that’s not happening.”

The problem the Grafs faced stems from Minnesota’s artificial insemination law, which establishes “husband treated as biological father.” Dibble said his bill would change husband to “spouse.” And that would do it.

The bill will be known as “Logan’s Law.”

WILL IT PASS?

“It will be a rough sled,” Dibble said. Republicans control the Senate and Dibble is not sure he can garner many, if any, Republican votes for the change.

When gay marriage was legalized, Democrats controlled both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office. Republicans had just suffered a stinging defeat when a ballot question that would hallow the same-sex marriage ban in the state Constitution failed. Since then, Republicans haven’t actively pushed the issue, but voting in favor of anything some might perceive as an LGBTQ rights issue might be another matter.

Through a spokeswoman, Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka declined to comment on the proposal, noting no bill had been formally introduced as of last week. He would need to read the specific wording before commenting, spokeswoman Katie Fulkerson said.

Cat Salonek, advocacy director for the LGBTQ group OutFront Minnesota, said her group is hopeful that 1-on-1 conversations with lawmakers will bear fruit.

“It’s such a simple understanding of changing those words,” Salonek said. “It won’t be as controversial as some other parentage issues. We’re not defining life or removing anyone’s rights. We’re simply recognizing the law as it should be recognized.”

WHAT ABOUT GAY MALE COUPLES?

Married gay men face something similar.

But because of the fact that only a womb can carry a child, married gay men face a different legal obstacle: surrogacy laws. Minnesota’s legal landscape surrounding surrogacy — when a third-party is inseminated and carries the baby — is murkier than artificial insemination already. And that’s before you even bring in the notion of two fathers raising a child.

Salonek said it’s such a touchy issue that OutFront isn’t even pushing for it this year, even though, in theory, a few changes to gender-neutral terms in a few statutes might do the trick. “We just believe it would be too difficult to get it through the Senate,” she said.

WHAT ABOUT TRANSGENDER COUPLES?

In what might be the oddest quirk of the whole thing, some transgender couples don’t have any of these problems.

Here’s the scenario: A trans man — someone who might have been previously considered a woman but now identifies as a man — legally marries a woman. This has been allowed ever since same-sex marriage was legalized, since the law is now gender-blind. In that scenario, the couple is treated just like a “traditional” woman-man couple under current law: She’s the wife, he’s the husband.

If, for whatever reason, she opts for to artificial insemination from a donor, she’s the mother, and he’s the father.