WHEN FAMILY IS NOT A HOUSEHOLD WORD
Peck, Keenen
When family Is Not a Household Word New arrangements leave the law behind BY KEENEN PECK If my friends had been married, the three of us could have lived in peace. Instead, the authorities...
...As of this writing, the plan has not been adopted...
...In our case, my roommates and I asserted the simple right to live where and with whom we wanted...
...Instead, the authorities ordered us to vacate our home...
...In Santa Cruz, California, city workers and their loved ones may sign an "Affidavit of Domestic Partnership" to qualify the partners for health benefits...
...The law should focus on the societal interest, which is in long-term, supportive relationships...
...courts in Missouri, New Hampshire, and Hawaii have ruled against nontraditional living arrangements...
...The Census Bureau called them POSSLQs—Persons of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters...
...The form would make partners and dependents eligible for the benefits given to nuclear families...
...But there seems to be a more fundamental concern behind the opposition to alternative families—the feeling that the nuclear family forms society's bedrock...
...The powers that be are frightened by the prospect of yet another unfamiliar constituency demanding legal recognition...
...The high courts of New Jersey, California, New York, and Michigan have used their states' constitutions to protect alternative families...
...In addition to providing benefits for partners of municipal workers, the ordinance also requires hospitals and jails to permit visitation by partners...
...Alternative family" also encompasses gay and lesbian couples and the dependents of all unmarried couples...
...Something in the nuclear family is wrong if almost New types of loving relationships are perceived as a threat to the very order of things...
...A union contract can help, but only if the union is enlightened enough to deal with the problem in the first place...
...Actually, the law prohibited anal intercourse between men and women as well, but the homophobic majority ignored that fact...
...There might as well have been a sign at the end of our street: Alternative Families, Keep out...
...Although blood relation, marriage, and adoption have served as useful shorthands for "family," the legal establishment must now find categories that can accommodate new living arrangements without losing all definition...
...In West Hollywood, California, domestic partners can swear out a form indicating that they "share the common necessities of life," "are each other's sole domestic partner," and "agree to be responsible for each other's welfare...
...What is the motive for perpetuating such discrimination...
...In the meantime, I'll be asking for nothing more than the right to live with unmarried friends in a house of my choosing...
...The law has lagged behind changes in our lifestyle...
...It's called "single-family zoning," and it's a pernicious form of discrimination against those in loving but unorthodox relationships...
...women didn't need membership in formerly all-male clubs...
...Only one state, Wisconsin, prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and no state permits persons of the same sex to marry...
...Thus, gay and lesbian couples are denied the legal benefits of marriage, such as the automatic passing of property to the surviving partner when the other one dies without a will...
...About 15 per cent of the work force has signed up in West Hollywood, which has a large gay population...
...Despite the support of the Madison Equal Opportunities Commission, however, the proposal encountered resistance in the usually liberal town...
...But in each of those instances, the aggrieved segment of the population persuaded the rest of us that "equal rights" means what it says...
...Twenty states have repealed laws against adultery, but cohabitators in some states still live under the threat of prosecution...
...In my neighborhood, it turned out, three unrelated people could not live together legally...
...Although the media have concentrated on the steamy (or contagious) aspects of the sexual revolution, that revKeenen Peck, a lawyer, is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...
...Cohabitation has not simply become increasingly common," they said upon the release of their $4.5 million study...
...Employers and insurance companies, moreover, don't want to spend the money to cover children and lovers who are deemed family in expanded benefits plans...
...The same judge hinted at another reason behind hostility toward alternative families: the generation gap...
...Like state governments, employers and insurance companies often refuse to treat unmarried or unadopted loved ones as family for the purposes of various benefits...
...gay couples don't need to marry...
...and what is wrong with an alternative relationship that's lasting and loving...
...Steven Ruggles, the Minnesota demographer, found no significant differences between married and unmarried couples "in terms of satisfaction, commitment, sexual satisfaction, communication, or psychological adjustment...
...To make matters worse, the U.S...
...By the same token, though, blacks didn't need to ride in the front of the bus...
...College students, to be sure, can put strain on a family-oriented neighborhood...
...receive employment-based health insurance, bereavement and sick leave, pensions, moving expenses, library and recreational privileges, and low-cost day care and travel packages...
...The strength of one's rights in these situations turns on the interpretation of each state's constitution by its own judiciary...
...The problem with this objection is that it ignores the negative attributes of nuclear families and the positive characteristics of alternative families...
...Looked at from the other side of the numbers, fewer than 30 per cent of us live in a traditional nuclear family, defined as a married couple with children...
...and receive low-cost family rates from organizations such as health clubs, museums, and art centers...
...According to two University of Wisconsin sociologists, Larry Bumpass and James Sweet, the proportion of persons cohabitating before their first marriage has quadrupled (to 44 per cent) over the past two decades...
...Under penalty of perjury, the two affirm, "We are each other's sole domestic partner and intend to remain so indefinitely and are responsible for our common welfare...
...A happy or sad, healthy or abusive relationship will not be made less or more so with a marriage certificate...
...partners don't need benefits that accrue to their lovers...
...Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that Georgia could enforce a law against "homosexual sodomy...
...People who set rules and policies are likely to hark back to an era when sexual taboos limited alternative living arrangements...
...In 1980, the year of the last census, some 1.8 million Americans were living as cohabitating couples, a 300 per cent increase from the number in 1970...
...But in 1974, the U.S...
...In all, there are about ten million people in the United States who can be classified as belonging to alternative families, reports Steven Ruggles, a demographer at the University of Minnesota...
...We lost in the trial court (the case is now on appeal), but the experience offered a lesson in civil rights...
...Two cities have attempted to do so...
...To them, alternative families don't need to live in family-oriented neighborhoods...
...The city should regulate the use of dwellings, not the users...
...Never mind that we enjoyed the area...
...Supreme Court had held that the Constitution does not stop municipalities from restricting households composed of unrelated persons...
...Still, in the words of a recent New Jersey court opinion, students should not be "required to govern their lifestyle to meet the dictates of those who disapprove of their ways...
...We discovered that we were part of a growing legal debate over the definition of "family...
...Following the example of the California cities, a member of the Madison Common Council proposed a similar plan...
...When Madison told us to move, we sued the city...
...The Santa Cruz personnel department indicates that 2 per cent of the municipal work force has signed on the dotted line...
...A person's marital status has nothing to do with his or her compatibility with the neighbors, we said...
...And should the law treat the functional equivalent the same as the real item...
...The term "alternative family" refers to several kinds of living situations, the most common of which is the unmarried heterosexual couple...
...Law professor Barbara Cox, writing in the Wisconsin Women's Law Journal, has catalogued the entitlements that are extended to nuclear families but withheld from alternative families: "They include the opportunity to live in neighborhoods zoned for single families...
...olution has also led to a struggle over such mundane but important matters as insurance, housing, and inheritance...
...I was sharing a three-bedroom house in Madison, Wisconsin, with an unmarried couple—a man and a woman who intended to make a life together but didn't want to get married just yet...
...visit family members in hospitals and authorize their emergency medical treatment...
...Never mind that we were good, quiet neighbors...
...To reach their decisions, all of the courts grappled with the same essential questions: When does a household become, in lawyer's jargon, the "functional equivalent" of a family...
...Increasingly, Americans who live in groupings they regard as families but who are not related by blood, marriage, or adoption are pressing courts, legislatures, and employers for the same rights claimed by traditional families...
...In Madison and elsewhere, officials are whispering, "Enough is enough...
...Partners would be allowed to file an affidavit with the city stating that they are in a relationship of "mutual support, caring, and commitment...
...Our arrangement was illegal because Madison, like many other cities, prohibits occupancy by more than two unrelated persons in neighborhoods designated for families...
...In the field of housing, opposition to alternative families is often really bias against college students who, local governments fear, will wreak havoc in com-munes.This was the unspoken justification for Madison's ordinance, and it figures in much of the litigation over zoning (including the 1974 U.S...
...And homophobia afflicts politicians and employers, too...
...We pointed out that it in no way advanced the admirable goals of residential stability and tranquility...
...sue for loss of consortium, worker's compensation or unemployment compensation...
...The rise of the alternative family makes it essential to find answers...
...half of new marriages end in divorce...
...poor people didn't need the vote...
...Consanguinity and lawn mowing are not connected...
...No marriage license, no occupancy...
...When I try to fathom why the Madison plan fell flat—and, for that matter, why the city tried to oust three people from their home—one word comes to mind: fright...
...What's more, half of the cohabitants in the University of Wisconsin study married within three years, suggesting that an alternative status is frequently temporary...
...In the coming years, many Americans will be asking for equal rights for the ten million members of alternative families...
...New types of loving relationships are perceived as a threat to the very order of things...
...Supreme Court case...
...We argued that the ordinance violated our right to associate with one another...
...If recent trends continue, it will soon be the majority experience...
Vol. 52 • September 1988 • No. 9
