Family Law and Policy Adoption Rights. Former

almost half of the largest corporations in the United States had extended their own employee benefit plans to recognize same-sex partners (most of them also including de facto heterosexual couples for the first time). The vast majority of major universities and colleges had taken the same step by that time. While some of these changes were induced by legal or statutory change at the local or state level, others were the result of pressure from employee groups and labor unions, assisted by regional and national activist groups. Parenting Issues Equity claims that raise the specter of lesbians and especially gay men in close contact with children are explosive , fueled by fears about sexual predation and childhood vulnerability. And yet parenting issues were among the first relationship issues to be raised by lesbians and gay men. From at least the 1970s, lesbian mothers were fighting openly for custody of children from earlier heterosexual relationships or defending themselves from the threat of losing custody. Pressure for change in par-enting regimes intensified in the 1980s with the rapid growth in the number of gays and especially lesbians who had children as same-sex couples, or who aspired to. It also came from the prominence acquired by other relationship issues from the end of that decade on and the increased visibility of openly lesbian and gay couples. Parenting claims in such areas as custody, adoption, foster care, and assisted reproduction lie within state jurisdiction, though individual courts have considerable room for maneuver. Custody disputes regularly appear before state and local courts, for example, and adoptions have to be approved in them. The particularly compelling circumstances of individual disputes or claims for second parent adoption in court have resulted in a surprising number of favorable rulings. Some of these decisions have been in states without much else in legislative or legal recognition of sexual and gender diversity. On custody, there were favorable rulings in the 1970s (the first reportedly in 1967), but often they were accompanied by rules prohibiting cohabitation with a same-sex partner, or indeed any outward manifestations of homo-sexuality. By the 1980s most jurisdictions had adopted the " best interests of the child " standard in adjudicating disputes , in theory reducing the categorical exclusion of par-enting claims by lesbians and gay men. An additional opening seemed to appear with Palmore v. Sidoti, a 1984 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on a …