Let me repeat myself:
I try to be cynical, but I just can’t keep up.
A New York judge has ruled, by way of a “new interpretation of intimate,” that close friends may now adopt a child together.
From the National Catholic Register:
NEW YORK — A New York state judge has delivered an unprecedented ruling that says close friends who live in separate households can legally adopt children together.
“KAL and LEL are two loving adults who are both functioning as G.’s parents and have a relationship with each other built on a solid, decade-plus friendship,” stated Surrogate Rita Mella in her Dec. 27, 2013, ruling from Manhattan surrogate court.
Surrogate Mella’s ruling, “The Matter of G.,” involves two friends, living in separate households, who decided to adopt a child from Ethiopia together in 2011. According to court papers, the woman, identified as KAL, first wanted to conceive a child via artificial insemination. She then told her wish for a child to her male friend, identified as LEL, who then offered to donate his own sperm. Both KAL and LEL have been friends since 2000, and LEL’s offer meant KAL would not have to use an anonymous sperm donor. After failed attempts at in vitro fertilization, KAL and LEL decided to adopt “G.,” a 2-year-old child from Ethiopia …
… “It’s madness,” Ed Mechmann, director of the family life office for the Archdiocese of New York, told the Register. “It just shows how far our society has gone once we move away from marriage as the norm, and we leave these things up to judges. It really just shows there is no limit.”
While Mella’s ruling may be unprecedented, the judge outlines the legal basis for how she came to the conclusion that close friends could adopt under New York state law. Mella noted that the state’s domestic relations law was amended in 2010 to allow “any two unmarried adult intimate partners together” the ability to adopt, alongside single persons and married couples..
But Mella said it was “difficult to identify a definitive plain meaning of [the term] ‘intimate partners,’” since the New York Legislature did not bother to define the term.
She added, “It is a relatively new phrase, and one of many imprecise terms used to describe relationships along a continuum between ‘acquaintance’ or ‘friend’ and ‘sexual partner’ or ‘spouse.’”
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