A couple weeks ago, a story broke that got the heterosexual community in a frenzy — Norman MacArthur and Bill Novak of Bucks County petitioned a court to dissolve their legal adoption so they could get married.
MacArthur and Novak were father and son in the eyes of the law for 15 years, but together as partners in life for more than 50 years. Because of historical opposition to gay marriage, it has happened that longterm, same-sex couples adopted one another for legal protection; they couldn’t sit around and wait for marriage equality to show up, so they creatively circumvented the negative outcomes that default laws imposed on couples who at that time were considered “legal strangers.”
Novak and MacArthur are in excellent company. Bayard Rustin, the civil-rights organizer who imparted nonviolence credos to Martin Luther King Jr., adopted his partner, Walter Naegle, for inheritance-tax purposes. The process required Naegle’s mother to legally disown him, an understandably painful process. With that said, despite being “out” as partners during the course of their 10-year relationship, Naegle was cited as Rustin’s son in Rustin’s 1987 New York Times obituary. While Naegle was denied his true status as Bayard’s life partner in print, the legal maneuvering granted him the role of being the executor of Rustin’s estate.
Robert Allerton, the wealthy son of the founder of First Chicago Bank, openly adopted his partner, John Gregg, in 1959 following a change in Illinois law that allowed adult adoptions. Gregg was 22 when he met 49-year-old Allerton at a pre-football game lunch at the University of Illinois in the 1920s. After enjoying a nearly 40-year union that included lavish parties, traveling and philanthropy, Gregg inherited much of Allerton’s estate after he passed away in 1964 at the inheritance rate of a child, as opposed to that of a legal stranger.
More recently, in June 2013 — again right here in Pennsylvania — 65-year-old John Francis legally adopted his 73-year-old partner for financial protection. They were primarily concerned about Pennsylvania’s inheritance tax, which at the time made one partner liable for a 15-percent tax on the estate, as opposed to 4.5 percent if they went ahead with adoption. They decided on the adoption almost immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Windsor vs. United States because, at the time, Pennsylvania and more than 30 other states still denied LGBTQ people the right to marry.
While it’s true that legally adopting your partner saved people from inheritance taxes and gave his or her partner hospital-visitation rights, the benefits came at a cost. First of all, in order for the adoption to pass muster, there is an inherent lie being told to the court. The relationship is not that of parent and child and, as such, the only way for a judge to approve the adoption is to state under oath something that is inherently untrue.
Moreover, the reasoning in wanting to adopt has predominantly been to avoid inheritance taxes, so said “lies” could be seen as tax evasion despite the fact that the reasoning was because people felt marriage rights were being withheld. Rule of law is in place so that if people feel a law is discriminatory, they should fight to reverse or change it, not evade it.
Another imbedded psychological downfall is that one of the adults is cemented as the “child.” This, in turn, engenders an unhealthy distribution of power in same-sex couples. The adoption/partnership also requires one partner to sever important legal ties with living family members, just as Naegle had to with his mother. For same-sex couples with living parents, their family is considerably lessened in one way while bolstered in another. Lastly, and probably most importantly, the financial and emotional risk of adoption is much greater than marriage in that one cannot “divorce” their adult adopted child. In a way, these legal commitments to one another trump even the intended longevity of legal marriage, in that the bond used is irrevocable.
Despite the downfalls, the practice is now gaining favor internationally where marriage equality doesn’t exist. In Japan, for instance, inheritance rights are based off of the Koseki Family Registry and so, in order to pass on inheritance rights, one gay partner will register the other in his or her “family unit” on the registry. This is done quite easily and without raising a red flag (especially among men) because adult adoptions are common practice in Japan. When the blood heir to a corporation is a slacker or not up to the task, the company CEO often adopts his chosen protégé to carry on the family business. And it’s not a coincidence that Japan and the United States have the highest rates of adoption in the world.
While adoptions used to be very difficult to reverse, Novak and MacArthur have set precedent in Pennsylvania, and I think nationwide, as their story gains more press. Judges can now rely on marriage equality in their respective states to dissolve the adoptions, allowing LGBTQ individuals to enter into a marital union. While past legal maneuvering has been helpful to some, it has also hurt the LGBTQ community emotionally and psychologically by further degrading us and delegitimizing our true and authentic relationships to one another. Hopefully by the end of the month we’ll see an end to a need for “creative lawyering” forever because we’ll finally be deemed equal citizens under the law, nationwide.