Key Ruling On Gays Raising Kids

Same-sex couples who raise children are lawful parents, and just like heterosexual couples they must provide for their children if they break up, the California Supreme Court ruled.

The justices ruled for the first time Monday that custody and child support laws that hold absent fathers accountable also apply to estranged gay and lesbian couples who used reproductive science to conceive.

Being a legal parent "brings with it the benefits as well as the responsibilities," said Justice Joyce Kennard.

The court's ruling, involving three separate cases, is the latest to recognize rights of same-sex couples.

The court granted a woman the right to be the second mother of twins after the birth mother moved out of state. It also ruled that a lesbian woman cannot avoid paying child support for her former partner's biological children. And it decided another woman could not go to court to terminate the parental rights of her former lover years after obtaining a court order stipulating both were parents.

"The court is now protecting the children of same sex parents in gay families in the same way children are protected with heterosexual couples in heterosexual families," said Jill Hersh, who argued the unnamed Marin County woman's case.

Emily B., an El Dorado County woman whose former lover must now pay to support the children following the court's ruling, said she might be able to get off of welfare now.

"I'm absolutely overjoyed today," she said.

The court ruled three years ago that men who establish themselves as parent figures may become legal fathers even if they did not help conceive the child.

"These legal principles apply with equal force in this case," Kennard wrote in the case ordering a lesbian woman to support her former lover's twins.

Groups opposing same-sex marriage decried the justices' actions.

"Today's ruling defies logic and common sense by saying that children can have two moms," said attorney Mathew Staver of the nonprofit Liberty Counsel law firm. "That policy establishes that moms and dads as a unit are irrelevant when it comes to raising children."