Lambda Legal Asks Federal Court to Fast Track Case Seeking to Strike Down Oklahoma's Extreme Antigay Adoption Law

(Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, December 1, 2005) — In papers being filed today in United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, Lambda Legal seeks to strike down Oklahoma’s Adoption Invalidation Law, a law so extreme that it has the potential to make children adopted by same-sex couples in other states legal orphans when the families are in or dealing with officials from the state of Oklahoma.

“In every state across the country, the status created by adoption has two essential components: the creation of parent-child relationships that are recognized across state boundaries and the establishment of a host of rights and obligations that arise from parenthood,” said Ken Upton, Senior Staff Attorney in Lambda Legal’s South Central Regional Office and lead attorney on the case. “Oklahoma’s Adoption Invalidation Law threatens to categorically deny the fundamental rights, obligations and protections flowing from the parent-child relationship and must be struck down.”

The Adoption Invalidation Law, hastily passed at the end of the 2004 Oklahoma legislative session, says that Oklahoma “shall not recognize an adoption by more than one individual of the same sex from any other state or foreign jurisdiction.” In her December 2004 ruling that found that Lambda Legal’s case can proceed in federal court, U. S. District Judge Robin Cauthron said that if the governor of Oklahoma “faithfully executes this Oklahoma law pursuant to his duty to do so, no state agency will recognize these Plaintiffs as a family and these Plaintiffs could be deprived of all the legal rights and obligations associated with that relationship.”

Lambda Legal argues that the law is unconstitutional based on the United States Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection, due process and right to travel, as well as the mandates of the Full Faith and Credit Clause.

Lambda Legal represents same-sex couples and their families who adopted children while living in other states and later moved to Oklahoma or want to visit the state with their family. Anne Magro and Heather Finstuen, together 14 years, are parents to seven-year-old twin girls born to Anne and adopted through a second-parent adoption by Heather when they lived in New Jersey. The family now lives in Norman, Oklahoma, where Anne teaches accounting at the University of Oklahoma. The new law endangers the legal relationship established by a New Jersey court between Heather and her daughters.

Also plaintiffs in the case are Ed Swaya and Greg Hampel, who live in Washington State and adopted their three-year-old daughter, Vivian, after she was born in Oklahoma. The two men made news when the state of Oklahoma initially refused to issue an amended birth certificate that accurately reflected both men as Vivian’s parents after a court in Washington issued an adoption decree. Before the new law was passed, the Oklahoma State Department of Health issued Vivian’s correct birth certificate, but Swaya and Hampel now fear bringing Vivian to Oklahoma to visit her birth mother and see the state where she was born.

Ken Upton, Senior Staff Attorney in Lambda Legal’s South Central Regional Office in Dallas is Lambda Legal’s lead attorney on the case. He is joined by Lambda Legal Staff Attorney, Brian Chase, and cooperating attorney Sandy Ingraham of Ingraham & Associates, P.L.L.C. in McLoud, Oklahoma.

The Case is Finstuen et al v. Edmondson et al.