It may not be on their minds as they walk down the aisle in Massachusetts, but along with gifts and toasts many gay couples are finally getting one of the biggest benefits of matrimony: the ability to obtain a clean divorce.
Because their unions were not legally binding, gay couples have had few protections when they split and have had to rely on the inconsistent mercy of judges to obtain alimony, parental rights or a stake in the couple's finances.
"The single most important thing you get with marriage is divorce, a predictable process by which property is divided, debt is apportioned and arrangements are made for custody and visitation of children," said Jo Ann Citron, a Boston lawyer researching a book on same-sex breakups called The Gay Divorcee.
Especially when children are involved, courts in liberal-leaning states such as Massachusetts, California and Washington have been increasingly willing to apply the principles of divorce laws to same-sex breakups.
But in more conservative states such as Texas and Virginia, judges have been loath to do anything that would confer marital-like standing on same-sex couples, even when partners have drawn up detailed contracts.
"The situation right now has created horror stories, where people put an awful lot of ... equity into property and into a life together, never held title to anything and got nothing," Citron said.
The clearest benefits will be for those who earn less than their same-sex partners, said Frederick Hertz, a real estate lawyer in Oakland, California, who has developed a lucrative specialty resolving legal disputes among the San Francisco Bay area's relatively affluent gay population.
Hertz recently represented a lesbian who had become a stay-at-home mother while her girlfriend climbed the corporate ladder. When they split up, the employed partner refused to include stock options among their joint assets.
"We got a decent settlement, but decent compared to nothing, not decent compared to what she would have gotten had they been married," Hertz said. "Access to marriage may level that playing field."
Gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts on Monday under a landmark ruling by the state's highest court. Vermont has granted spousal rights to gay couples with civil unions since 2000, making it the only other state where gays and lesbians are treated the same as married couples for the purposes of divorce.
In California, a law scheduled to take effect Jan. 1 would give the state's 25,000 couples registered as domestic partners access to family court proceedings when their relationships end.
"At the present time it is a very mixed sort of picture," said Art Leonard, a professor at New York Law School who monitors court rulings involving gays.
Couples who drafted agreements with a lawyer's help may be able to provide courts with rules to interpret. But problems arise when "they are just living together," Leonard said. "There is basically nothing there as far as a legal framework."
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS