Marriage, Biology, and Federal Benefits
This Article approaches the topic of same-sex marriage from a novel perspective by scrutinizing the historical accuracy of primary defense proffered by same-sex marriage opponents – “responsible procreation.” In the context of challenges to Section 3 of DOMA, responsible procreation posits that the federal government’s historic purpose in extending marital benefits is to single out and specially support families with biologically-related children. Because same-sex couples cannot fulfill this long-standing purpose, it is permissible to deny them all federal marital rights and obligations. While advocates disagree about whether and to what extent DOMA furthers this alleged federal interest, to date, all sides have accepted this historical account.This Article is the first to interrogate the accuracy of this account. To do so, the Article examines two of the largest and most important federal benefits programs – Social Security benefits and benefits for active and retired members of the U.S. military. This analysis demonstrates that Congress has not and does not condition the receipt of federal family-based benefits on biological parent-child relationships. To the contrary, Congress long has implicitly and explicitly extended such benefits to families with children known to be biologically unrelated to one or both of their parents. This Article thus reveals that responsible procreation is based on myth, not history and tradition.
Stigmatized portrayals of single women: a content analysis of news coverage on single women and single men in China
Abstract This study explored the stigmatized portrayals of single womanhood in news media by content analyzing news coverage from Mainland China of single women and single men from 2008 to 2013. Among the three prevalent news frames (conflict, responsibility, and human interest), the results showed that news reports relating to single women commonly employed more human-interest frames and concentrated on single women’s conflicts with other social groups as well as the conflicts between singles and societal expectation of population sustainability. News stories also unduly ascribed the responsibility for being ‘single’ to the women themselves, but such individual attribution was not applied to single men. As an exploratory study, our research shed light on how news framing is gendered to reinforce stereotypes and facilitate mechanisms for control. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in relation to public opinion about single womanhood and the intersectional oppression of single women in Chinese society.
Open Adoption, Inheritance, and the Uncleing Principle
This article critiques current inheritance law relating to adopted children in light of the purposes of modern adoption law and the increasing prevalence of open adoptions. The article proposes an uncling principle to determine intestate inheritance rights in cases of open adoption in which a birth parent has maintained a qualifying functional relationship with the adopted-out child subsequent to the adoption. When applicable, the uncling principle would treat the adopted-out child and her birth parent as potential heirs of one another. Unlike the presently dominant all-or-nothing approach to inheritance rights arising from adoption, however, the proposal would not under any circumstances treat the birth parent as a legal parent of the adopted-out child for purposes of inheritance. Rather, the uncling principle would treat the birth parent as an uncle or aunt to the adopted-out child, and would similarly increase the distance on the family tree between the adopted-out child and members of her birth family by one line of inheritance and two degrees of kinship. When applicable, the uncling principle would better serve the interests of the adopted child, her adoptive family, and her birth family than does the all-or-nothing approach, under which the adopted-out child is either a child of her birth parents for purposes of inheritance or is a stranger to her birth parents for purposes of inheritance. The uncling principle affirms the parental role of the adoptive parents by refusing to treat a birth parent as a legal parent. Simultaneously, the uncling principle recognizes and validates the importance of the bond between the adopted child and her birth family when the birth parent has maintained a sufficient functional relationship with the adopted child subsequent to the adoption.