New! Legal news column!

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Rainbow Families is committed to providing our community with a wide variety of services – including support, advocacy, education and information.   Along these lines, we identified a need for some legal perspective on issues that affect our LGBTQ+ family community.

(CLICK THE TOPIC HEADER TO READ MORE)

Michele Zavos, long-standing LGBTQ+ activist and attorney, will be providing a twice-monthly legal column for Rainbow Families.

Read her introduction here.

Thoughts from Michele

Hello all – This is the first installment of my bi-weekly legal column for Rainbow Families. For those of you who don’t know me, I am an attorney who has been working in and for our community for almost 40 years. My firm, Zavos Juncker Law Group, PLLC, practices in MD, DC and VA. I started the first Maybe Baby group with my then partner in 1982 and our daughter was born in 1985. I built the second-parent adoption practice in DC and MD in 1994, when these adoptions were first allowed. I have done over 1000 adoptions in those two jurisdictions, and my firm does so called
“step-parent “ adoptions in Virginia.   I  helped the DC City Council change laws to benefit our community with regard to divorce and adoption, and I have represented thousands of clients in my career, many of them in our community.    My passion has always been our families.  

In this column I intend to keep you up-to-date on the law, where I see it going, and how you and your family can protect yourselves in this dangerous political environment. 

 Stay tuned! Michele

Mass. Supreme Judicial Court: Parenting Rights Extend Even if Couple Unmarried

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Since the ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2015 that brought Marriage Equality to the entire United States, numerous cases have been brought and heard before courts at all levels throughout the country with implications for LGBTQ parents and their children.

On Oct. 4, 2016, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, the state’s highest court, ruled, “The parenting rights of a mother in a same-sex relationship extends even when the couple is unmarried and the mother has no biological connection to the children.”

From an article in the Boston Globe, “Partanen and legal analysts said the ruling extends her parental rights while protecting her children’s rights to claim two parents, regardless of their marital status. It will allow Partanen to claim the children on legal paperwork, such as for insurance benefits, and it means she will be required to pay child support. It will also allow her to be listed on the children’s birth certificates.”

CLICK HERE to read an article on the Court’s ruling and HERE.

CLICK HERE to read the Full Decision from the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.

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