Lesbian Sues for Denying Access to Dying Partner

A gay woman not allowed to visit her dying partner at Jackson Memorial Hospital in 2007 hopes a federal judge will allow her claims of emotional distress and negligence to go to trial.

This from Laura Figueroa in the Miami Herald:

"As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with doctors and anyone who would listen to let her into the woman's hospital room.
Eight anguishing hours passed before Langbehn would be allowed into Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center. By then, she could only say her final farewell as a priest performed the last rites on 39-year-old Lisa Marie Pond.
Jackson staffers advised Langbehn that she could not see Pond earlier because the hospital's visitation policy in cases of emergency was limited to immediate family and spouses -- not partners. In Florida, same-sex marriages or partnerships are not recognized. On Friday, two years after her partner's death, Langbehn and her attorneys were in federal court, claiming emotional distress and negligence in a suit they filed last June. "

Please, please read the rest of the article here.
http://www.miamiherald.com/277/story/892447.html

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I want you to understand the pain that lesbian and gay partners can endure under the present laws. When I founded the Express Gay News in 1999, one of the first articles I ran was the tragic story of a gay NBC staffer who was killed in a helicopter crash. His partner of ten years was denied access to their home and the funeral after his death, because the parents of the deceased gay reporter could not accept their son was gay and had a male partner.

Six months later, a lesbian police officer was slain in a bank robbery in Tampa. The Hillsborough County Commission was denied the right to give her surviving spouse, another police officer, benefits, because they were not legally married. And years later, pending now in Fort Lauderdale before Judge Moe, I have a case of false arrest against the State, where one gay partner cannot claim a lack of consortium for his spouse, because there is no legal right to marry.

These issues are not abstract. They are very real, very human. Judge Cindy Lederman understood this when she empowered a gay couple to adopt last month. Lesbians and gays love and breathe and bleed and die just like straight couples. That is what the fight for equal rights is all about. Join it today. Feel better about yourself tomorrow. N.K.

Florida Bar Says 'Go' To Gay Adoptions

The National Law Journal reports that Florida Bar's board of governors voted unanimously to file an amicus brief before the 3rd District Court of Appeal supporting a Miami-Dade circuit judge's ruling that declared unconstitutional the state's ban on gay adoptions. Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman ruled in November that the state's ban on gay adoption was unconstitutional.

A feature about this also appears in the Daily Business Review. The decision should be applauded and celebrated, as much for its progressive foundation as for the Florida Bar's willingness to publicly declare, on this issue at least, they will be a force for the future. They are behind the curve on many other issues.

In Florida, no matter what, if the person is gay, they cannot adopt. And the judge has no leeway, under the neanderthal statute which came about as a result of Anita Bryant and her orange juice crusade thirty years ago.

Kudos and complimentst to Bar governor Ervin Gonzalez, a partner with Colson Hicks Eidson in Coral Gables who was a key supporter of filing the amicus brief. At the heart of the adoption issue is the question of whether a gay couple can enjoy the same rights and privileges as a straight couple. Of course they should be able to. Saw today on the ABA Journal that some federal judge in NY just got arrested for slapping his wife. Guess we should take his kids away.

Not every blog or blurb needs to be a thousand words. This is an issue that the right wing legislature should have resolved a decade ago. Every progressive state has. Thousands of kids in Florida need better schooling and parenting but no one needs an education more than the legislators whose moral compass is so broken they will not fix this retarded, offensive, discriminatory statute, which purposefully and callously denies gay citizens equal rights.

Maybe my self interest is involved as a gay man, but I would have made a damn good parent, a lot better than some of those those righteous, chest-pounding, morality-preaching goons in Tallahassee.