Father Legally Marries Son After 52 Years Together

A couple who were legally father and son for the last fifteen years had their adoption vacated and were married this week after 52 years together.

Norman MacArthur, 74, and Bill Novak, 76, were married in Pennsylvania on Sunday. The couple, who has been together since their 20s, registered as domestic partners in New York City in 1994, but in 2000 they moved to Erwinna, Penn., where domestic partnerships are not legally recognized. “When we moved to Pennsylvania, we had both retired and we were of the age where one begins to do estate planning,” MacArthur says.

“We went to a lawyer who told us Pennsylvania was never going to allow same-sex marriage, so the only legal avenue we had in order to be afforded any rights was adoption.”

MacArthur says he thought the suggestion was strange at first. “It struck me as fairly unusual, but we looked into it and discovered that other couples had done it. [Without the adoption] we would be legally strangers.” An adoption would grant the couple certain legal rights they felt compelled to secure. “Most importantly, it would allow us visitation rights in a hospital, and gaining of knowledge if one of us was in the hospital,” he says. “With new HIPAA privacy laws, hospitals are very constrained in what they can say to other people. If we were legally related, I would be allowed into the ER and entitled to know what Bill’s condition was if anything should happen.”

So in 2000, the two went through with a legal adoption. Since both men’s parents were dead, the adoption proceeding was fairly easy. “It wasn’t as though I was replacing one parent with another,” MacArthur says. “I was the son and Bill was the father. Bill is two years older than I am, so that was the only reason.”

Hayley Gorenberg, deputy legal director at Lambda Legal, says that while adoptions like these aren’t common, they aren’t unheard of, either. “It reflects people’s deep need to protect each other as family, and the attempt to use law that obviously isn’t a perfect fit to their situation to protect each other,” she tells Yahoo Parenting. “While we’ve had a patchwork nation and people have been desperate to take care of each other in some basic way legally, people have sometimes gotten creative to do what they need to do to protect each other as a family. It’s entirely understandable.”

Culled : YahooNews