We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Agency Nullification: Defying Bans on Gay and Lesbian Foster and Adoptive Parents.
- Authors
George, Marie-Amélie
- Abstract
Bureaucrats working for executive agencies have been as central to the victories of the LGBT rights movement as judges and legislators. This Article uncovers the history of gay and lesbian family law to establish how the administrative state shaped discourse about homosexuality and made marriage equality litigation possible. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, states began promulgating bans on gay and lesbian foster and adoptive parenting, prohibitions that civil servants opposed because they did not serve the best interests of children. Instead of implementing the bans, bureaucrats worked to overturn them, limited their application, or defied them in their entirety, thereby nullifying the laws. The actions of bureaucrats not only helped to dispel social prejudices that portrayed gays and lesbians as harmful to children, but also publicly recast gay men and women as parents and community members, which promoted other LGBT rights. With gay and lesbian families becoming increasingly common, the need to protect the interests of children with same-sex parents became a powerful argument in favor of marriage equality. The discursive shift that agency nullification fostered was essential to the fight for marriage rights and demonstrates the power of bureaucrats to effectuate legal change. The history that this Article presents revises existing scholarship on LGBT legal history, which has focused on the ways in which bureaucrats have frustrated rights claims, and contributes to an emerging scholarship on the role of the administrative state in promoting civil rights.
- Subjects
LGBTQ+ rights; NULLIFICATION (States' rights); LESBIAN foster parents; LEGAL status of adoptive parents; LEGAL status of gay parents
- Publication
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 2016, Vol 51, Issue 2, p363
- ISSN
0017-8039
- Publication type
Article