WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday overturned an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that said the state should not recognize a lesbian mother’s adoption of three children in neighboring Georgia.
The court overturned the decision without scheduling the case for oral arguments and full briefing. It said the Alabama high court’s decision ignored long-standing precedent that state courts must recognize legitimate rulings by courts in other states.
The justices already had granted a stay request from one of the mothers, identified in court papers as V.L. The Alabama high court said Georgia courts violated their own state laws in granting the adoptions of the children V.L. shared with her former partner, and thus she did not deserve custody or even visitation with the children.
V.L. adopted the children whom her longtime partner, identified in court papers as E.L., delivered after becoming pregnant from a donor. The couple later broke up in Alabama, where they lived.
“The Georgia judgment appears on its face to have been issued by a court with jurisdiction, and there is no established Georgia law to the contrary,” the Supreme Court wrote in an unsigned opinion in which there were no recorded dissents.
“It follows that the Alabama Supreme Court erred in refusing to grant that judgment full faith and credit.”
Lawyers for V.L. had argued that the decision violates the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause, which requires that states respect court judgments, including adoption orders, issued by courts in other states.
The case represents a new round of legal challenges in the wake of the court’s decision in June that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry.
Gay rights groups have said legal marriage will not solve myriad problems for gay parents, particularly those who were raising children together before the legalization of same-sex unions and then split up.
The case is V.L. v. E.L.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Robert Barnes
