Michigan Governor Rick Snyder Tells Lesbian Couple And Their Three Children: You Are Not A Family

By Jean Ann Esselink on July 23, 2013

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder and Attorney General Bill Schuette  filed their response yesterday to the complaint of Jayne and April DeBoer-Rowse, who are challenging Michigan’s ban on same-sex marriage. According to the governor and the attorney general, Jayne and April and the three beautiful children in the photo above, are not a family.

Jayne and April, who have become near and dear to our hearts here at The New Civil Rights Movement, originally filed a lawsuit because they wanted to both be allowed to adopt the three children they are raising together, which is not allowed in Michigan. The state moved for a summary judgement, but Federal Judge Bernard Friedman denied their request, instead suggesting to the couple that they amend their complaint to challenge the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. He then adjourned the proceedings so he could be advised by the Supreme Court’s decisions in the DOMA and Prop 8 cases that were before it.
Now the Supreme Court has ruled, and Judge Friedman has set a trial date for October. Yesterday, the state filed their response to the DeBoer-Rowse complaint, opening with the mother of all “Catch-22s”. April adopted the couple’s daughter Ryanne, and Jayne adopted the couple’s sons, Nolan and Jacob, only because the state would not allow them to both adopt each child. Now the state has used the fact that only one woman is the legal parent of each child as their “proof” that April and Jayne and the children who call them Mom are not a family, and do not enjoy the rights and privileges of one.
I cannot imagine anyone meeting the DeBoer-Rowses and not believing them to be a family. In a little over the space of a year, they adopted baby Nolan, with the big brown eyes, who came to them in a private adoption. Nolan was hardly a year old before Ryanne came into their lives, the drug addicted third baby of a nineteen-year old mother. And while Jayne and April were going the extra mile to make sure special needs baby Ryanne had the therapy she needed to have a chance at a normal life, along came Jacob. Given up by his mother at birth, tiny baby Jacob had failed to thrive  after months in the Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit. Jayne, who is a nurse in the NICU, was asked by his social worker to take baby Jacob home to comfort him while he died. Instead, Jayne and April took him home and saved him. Now the state says that Jayne, whose arms carried Jacob out of the hospital, is not his mother?

Read the story of Superheros Jayne and April and the babies they adopted.

What dark irony is there in that the State of Michigan, who threw away little Jacob’s life like he was an unnecessary expenditure, a living breathing line item veto, would now think to argue that the mothers who saved his life are not his family?
The response from Governor Snyder and Attorney General Schuette also denies that April and Jayne have been subjected to adverse or disparate treatment. I am not a lawyer, but the state’s arguments seems a weak response in the wake of Justice Kennedy’s decision in Windsor V US, in which he refers to same-sex couples and their children as “families”. In fact, the Justice wrote that denying marriage to their same-sex parents “humiliates” children by making it difficult for them “to understand the integrity and closeness of their own family.”
We now wait for October and Judge Friedman’s decision. But if the Michigan marriage law depends on whether Jayne and April and their children, Nolan, Ryanne and precious little Jacob are a family, it’s going down. There is no other word that describes them so well: family.

Photo is from Jayne’s Facebook Page