The Marriage Law Project at The Catholic University of America

TOP6NEWS - Date 3.22.05

1-NEWS: ACLU files suit in MI over DP benefits
2-NEWS: Appellate judge rules CA man can pursue suit over partner's death

3-NEWS: MI man wants to change paternity law

4-NEWS: VT Dems believe CU backlash is over

5-OP-ED: C. Hoff-Summers: Who stole Harvard?

6-OP-ED: R. George Secular confusion on Marriage

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1-NEWS: ACLU files suit in MI over DP benefits
FREE PRESS

Despite marriage ban, couples want health care March 22, 2005

BY NANCY A. YOUSSEF

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Monday asking the courts to protect same-sex couples' health benefits in light of a state constitutional ban on gay marriage.
In the suit, filed in Ingham County Circuit Court, the ACLU asked the court to stipulate that the ban on gay marriage does not extend to health care benefits for same-sex partners. The amendment, they said, is ambiguous.

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2-NEWS: Appellate judge rules CA man can pursue suit over partner's death

Long Beach Press

Finally, a day in court for 'Karel' Bouley Appellate judge rules Charles 'Karel' Bouley can pursue suit over partner's death.
By Wendy Thomas Russell, Staff writer
LONG BEACH — His medical malpractice case against Long Beach Memorial Medical Center has not been tried, but in many ways Charles "Karel" Bouley has already won. Last week, after three years of legal wrangling, the Long Beach man prevailed in an appellate court decision that gave him the right to sue for the wrongful death of his longtime domestic partner, Andrew Howard. For years, Bouley and Howard were hosts on KFI's "Karel & Andrew," believed to be the first popular talk radio show featuring gay partners. On March 15, when Bouley got the call on his cell phone about the appellate decision, he was at Red Lobster — a restaurant he and Howard frequented during their 11 years together.

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3-NEWS: MI man wants to change paternity law

He says he's the biological father, but law says matrimony trumps DNA

By John Agar

The Grand Rapids Press

TRAVERSE CITY -- After his girlfriend became pregnant, Bill Numerick Jr. looked forward to being a father.
He said he accompanied her to doctor appointments and took a parenting class.
But early in her pregnancy, she ended their relationship and married someone else. Heather Smith, now 22, had a boy, Caleb, on May 6, 2003. Numerick sent a teddy bear to the hospital.
Nearly two years later, he has not seen the boy he considers his son. By law, Numerick, 26, is not the father.
He filed what amounts to a reverse paternity lawsuit, asking that the child's mother be forced to acknowledge him as a father, allow visitation and accept child support.
But Numerick has no right to question paternity, a judge ruled, because the baby was not born out of wedlock. The state Court of Appeals recently upheld the trial-court decision.

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4-NEWS: VT Dems believe CU backlash is over

Leading Democrats view vote on justices as end of civil unions

By Ross Sneyd, Associated Press Writer

MONTPELIER, Vt. -- Leading Democrats believe the final act of the drama over the Legislature's enactment of civil unions for gay and lesbian couples five years ago finally has played itself out.
It came last week when the House and Senate jointly voted to retain four Supreme Court justices in office for another six-year term. Three of those justices served on the court in 1999 when it ruled that same-sex couples were being unconstitutionally denied the rights and benefits of marriage.
Their support for the decision in what became known as the Baker case was one of the arguments that the justices' opponents used in urging that they be fired for, among other allegations, overstepping their constitutional authority.
But when the votes were counted Thursday, none of the justices came close to losing his or her job.
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5-OP-ED: C. Hoff-Summers: Who stole Harvard?
Who Stole Harvard?
Big Sisters and Larry Summers.
By Christina Hoff Sommers
The Harvard faculty of arts and science just last week passed a motion expressing a lack of confidence in the leadership of President Lawrence Summers. Such censure is unprecedented in Harvard's near 400-year-history. Summers unwittingly stepped on the third rail of university politics when he speculated that innate differences between the sexes might be one reason there are fewer women than men at the highest echelons of math and science. To understand the hornets' nest Summers has stirred up, one needs to have a close look at the main hornets.
To an outsider, the controversy must look very strange. Nothing Summers said was a threat to the advancement of a single competent woman in any of the sciences. The statistical fact that more men tend to score in the top-five percent of math-aptitude tests makes no predictions whatsoever about the abilities of any particular man or woman. Far from being outrageous or sexist, Summers's comments were completely respectable and altogether mainstream. But not in the academy. As one outraged Harvard feminist professor of ethics, Mahzarin Banaji, told the Harvard Crimson, "In this day and age to believe that men and women differ in their basic competence for math and science is as insidious as believing that some people are better suited to be slaves than masters."

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6-OP-ED: R. George Secular confusion on Marriage

Washington Times, DC, March 22, 2005
Culture Briefs (excerpt)
Secular confusion

"Most of my professional life is spent interacting with secular liberal academics. What I tell them is that they are living off the cultural capital of Judeo-Christian moral understanding and depleting it quickly. Most liberal academics say they favor marriage and just want it to be available to homosexuals and heterosexuals on equal terms. ...

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