[polyamory] a year since Somerville

Somerville, MA

Last summer [scroll down here for my locked post at the time], Somerville (MA) was updating their domestic partner ordinance and took the opportunity (as a somewhat last-minute decision) to expand it to include polyamorous domestic partnerships.

Last July 1, my partner shared Somerville City Councilor (Ward 2) JT Scott's post about it on FB.

Yesterday, my partner Shared their FB Memory of the announcement and said, "Has it been a year already?" Councilor Scott commented this morning: "It has been a year... and several families have registered... and we just might be introducing some new modifications to make it even more inclusive before the end of 2021!"

So that's exciting!

(Also, this is prompting me to finally make the post I've been accumulating since March of assorted polyam legal etc. news 😂)

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Cambridge, MA

After Somerville's June 29, 2020, domestic partnership update, The People's Republic of Cambridge quickly (tried to) follow suit.

March 8, 2021, my partner Shared a FB post (which links to this blogpost) about Cambridge finally passing their updated domestic partner ordinance.

Someone asked a series of ... maybe sincere, maybe concern-trolling? questions and my partner initially responded based on how the Somerville ordinance worked (assuming Cambridge's would be similar) and then later made a follow-up comment:

I’ve now read the Cambridge City ordinance [...] and it’s really well written. It _does not_ have the single partnership restrictions that Somerville does, and it also has a bunch of sections that address all sorts of things, including parental/guardianship rights, withdrawal from a partnership, notification of existing partner when a new partnership is created, etc. I suggest reading it to see how Cambridge is handling this.

https://cambridgema.iqm2.com/Citizens/Detail_LegiFile.aspx?Frame&MeetingID=2656&MediaPosition&ID=12316&CssClass&fbclid=IwAR2Cg0OWu4iuy3FKksbpR2MlWP3vhuKok8iHL4Zt-VUBBh50ZdxNvGJZ6MI

It’s worth noting that I think Somerville’s ordinance was very off-the-cuff, while Cambridge’s ordinance was written in conjunction with the newly-formed PLAC [Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition], whose press release is linked above. So I’m inclined to believe that future ordinances and laws will look more like the Cambridge ordinance.

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Arlington, MA

April 30, 2021, a WickedLocal article reported:

In what could be a watershed moment for multi-person relationships, Arlington became the first town in Massachusetts to approve domestic partnerships of more than two people when Town Meeting approved an amendment to a warrant article Wednesday, April 28. 

The motion states the town will recognize domestic partnerships containing two or more people, which is more inclusive of people in polyamorous relationships or other non-traditional family situations. The town recognition helps people in those relationships achieve the same kind of civil rights permitted to married couples, including visitation rights at health care facilities and access to children's school records. 

Somerville and Cambridge are the only communities in Massachusetts recognizing domestic partnerships between more than two people. However, those were proposed through city ordinances, which can only be removed if appealed by private residents. Because Arlington is a town, the motion approved at Town Meeting is subject to review and approval from the state Attorney General's office, and without any town having approved this type of motion before, Arlington will be in unprecedented legal ground when the AG reviews it. 

Originally, the article proposed at Town Meeting was to solely recognize domestic partnerships of two people. Town Meeting member Amos Meeks proposed the amendment extending the definition of recognized domestic partnerships to people who are in polyamorous relationships. Meeks said he worked with Town Meeting member Guillermo Hamlin and the Rainbow Commission, who helped put together the original article, as well as the Polyamory Legal Advocacy Coalition, an organization promoting the rights of people in polyamorous relationships. 

Meeks, who said he lives together with his two life partners, said the formal recognition would help him and anyone else in a similar relationship achieve certain civic rights, such as getting onto the insurance plans of their partners.

I haven't heard about the status of the AG ruling on this since, but it's still exciting.

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In other legal news:

California, USA

March 6, 2021, CNN published an article "Three dads, a baby and the legal battle to get their names added to a birth certificate":

Under a 2013 California law, a third parent can be added to a birth certificate after a child's birth if it can be shown that recognizing only two parents would be detrimental to the child.

[...]

The judge ruled in their favor before their daughter Piper was born in 2017. Jenkins believes they are the first polyamorous family in California, and possibly the country, to be named as the legal parents of a child. CNN has not been able to confirm that.

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March 15, 2021, the New Yorker published an article: "How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms" (ht/t were_duck on Twitter)

[sidenote: Aida Manduley, one of the polyam folks profiled here, was involved in Eve Rickert's transformative justice process -- and does not come off well in Rickert's report.]

From my partner in the group chat:

This article is interesting so far. It starts with polygamous Mormons, except they’re not fundamentalist, they’re excommunicated/non-practicing, and they converted to Mormonism _because of_ polygamy.

But in some ways, very much the Mormon polygamy vibe:
> “We already told him that, if he wants to add another wife, Brandy and I have to find her,” she said. “It’s not just going to be someone who Mr. Eternal Hope thinks might work. We’re the ones that have to live with her all the time.”

Utah, Somerville, and Cambridge get a shout out in the same paragraph.  

[...]

From one of Aida’s partners:
> Andy said that the idea was not “a sexy orgy bonanza” but a conscious rejection of two things: first, “dividing relationships into two categories—one category being people with whom you have sex and the other category being people with whom you don’t have sex,” and, second, “saying that those categories are defined by some deeply operative distinction that changes the fundamental nature of a relationship.” Polyamory, Andy acknowledged, is hard. “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it,” they added ruefully. The key was to “deal with the things that are abundant from a place of abundance and with the things that are actually scarce from a place of compassion and generosity.”

[...]

My one ~complaint is that so far the article has focused on full-time cohabitating units, which is not (and may never be) my personal situation.  

I would add these excerpts from the article:

Andy grew up in New Hampshire. “It’s not a place I would recommend growing up if you’re trans, for sure,” they said. “I learned when I was young that there was something very wrong with me that nobody would ever understand.” At Skidmore, they studied sociolinguistics. They had their first polyamorous relationship there, in a lesbian triad. “I started meeting more queer and trans people and realizing that it’s not that there’s something broken and weird about me.”

They went to law school in New York City. “I started encountering the idea that the state tells you about how the world works, what a family looks like, what gender is supposed to be,” they said. “As I was studying, I started to learn that there are discrepancies between the state’s stories and reality.”

That led Andy to think about personal choices. “I had had it in my head, Eventually, I’m going to have to do the grownup thing and find the spouse that I can tolerate and produce children. It’s going to suck. The first thing you realize might be, Oh, I don’t actually have to be a girl. Or, I don’t have to be in a relationship with the one person who provides the completion of my Platonic soul for the rest of my life. Whichever linchpin gets pulled out first, it all comes falling down. And once it’s all fallen down you can say, O.K., I’ve got all these pieces and now I can build something.” Andy gestured at the house and their spouses. “And this is what we’ve built,” they said.

[...]

Andy talked about a watershed moment for gay rights, in 1989—the case of Braschi v. Stahl. Miguel Braschi was being evicted from the rent-controlled apartment he and his partner shared, after the partner died, of AIDS. The landlord contended that the lease was transferrable only to family, and that Braschi wasn’t family. Braschi sued. The judge issued a stunningly progressive ruling saying that family should be based on the reality of daily life—these two men lived together, shared finances, took care of each other—and not on “fictitious legal distinctions,” such as marriage certificates. In Andy’s view, the subsequent campaign for gay marriage represented a missed opportunity. “In 1989, he said that a marriage certificate was a fictitious legal distinction,” Andy said with wonder. “The gay-rights movement took that and said, ‘Actually, no, we’re just going to throw that out and try and get married. That seems like a better plan.’ Imagine if we had taken that idea—that legal protections for family should be granted based on the reality of daily family life and interdependence and networks of mutual care rather than on fictitious legal distinctions—and run with it.”

[...]

Even before the Dargers’ book was published, Joe had started seeking out receptive Utah politicians. Rather than framing the issue as one of freedom of religion—an argument long rejected by Utah and federal courts—Joe framed it as a free-speech matter. “If we purported to be married, that was the felony, but I could call them mistresses—not a problem,” he told me. “Speech is our fundamental, most important right. Everything arises in language, and your identity is defined by language. If you can’t claim your identity, you grow up under a grave injustice.”