The Coronavirus entrenched itself into every facet of 2020. Every choice made by world leaders, non-profit organizations, and families was influenced by the coronavirus. For the city of Somerville Massachusetts, the coronavirus highlighted a glaring hole in their legislation. The city had no ordinance defining domestic partnerships. Unlike marriage, which in the United States has national legislation, domestic partnerships are left to the local jurisdictions.
Marriage vs Domestic Partnership
Domestic partnerships can grant access to a myriad of marriage-like rights such as: income tax benefits, paid family leave, joint adoption, and the power of attorney, among others. These rights are not a guarantee and often require supplemental documentation in order to ensure the partnership holds in the eyes of the law. As though the definition and usage of domestic partnerships were not convoluted enough, many eastern states have taken to calling them civil unions, while western states -- which typically have more concrete and pervasive laws protecting domestic partnerships -- still call them domestic partnerships. In some places, domestic partnerships don’t even refer to legal status but rather cohabitation. All of this legislative fog should highlight why cities like Sommerville needed concise documentation to protect their population, especially during a pandemic.
The Legal Value of Family
Somerville broke new ground with their domestic partnership ordinance. Passing unanimously on June 25, 2020, the ordinance granted unprecedented rights to polyamorous and non-traditional relationships. Relationships and families are both deeply personal concepts, affected by someone’s culture and experiences. However, they also have a great deal of value as definable concepts in the law. For example, a family member may have contracted the coronavirus and ended up in the hospital. The bill, without insurance, could be enough to send many spiraling into debt. But perhaps someone else within the household has family insurance provided by their employer. Now the relationship between these two has their very livelihoods' at stake. Generally, health insurance policy defines “a family means and includes an insured person, legal spouse, legal & dependent children, legal & dependent siblings, and dependent parents or dependent in-laws.” Conceptually this ordinance may be the first of its kind, but the language and motivations used to create this document can be easily traced. From there, it’s a question of what this change means for the people of Sommerville and what it could mean for families everywhere.
Expanding healthcare was the primary goal of city council president Matthew McLaughlin. Somerville has a population of 80,000 people, of which city councilor J.T. Scott says he knows at least two dozen polyamorous households. That’s easily 100 people (depending entirely on the size of the households) who until this summer has no legal access to confer health insurance or family visitation rights in hospitals. At the time of this ordinance's passing, Middlesex, the county containing Sommerville, had the highest reported cases of Coronavirus in the state of Massachusetts.
This is not the first time healthcare has put pressure on the definition of family. In 2010, President Obama released a memo granting greater agency to the patient to define their “family” as “a group of individuals with a continuing legal, genetic and/or emotional relationship.” However, under President Trump’s administration, healthcare and the rights of non-traditional families are just some of the few areas seeing rollbacks.
Outside of healthcare, there is also something strange regarding the ease with which this ordinance passes. Same-sex marriage had been slowly gaining public approval and normalization before the Supreme Court took a top-down approach to sweeping legalization. Polyamory--which is often defined as engaging in relationships with more than one other person with all partners knowing consent--is still overly sensationalized. For most Americans, the only reference points for polyamory are in religious cults or television shows like Sister Wives. Without any legal protection, it can be dangerous for polyamorous people to out themselves to co-workers or friends. This leads to people believing they don’t know anyone in a polyamorous relationship which then disinclines them from caring about granting them legal protection. It’s a terrible cycle with no easy solution. And unlike other queer-centered civil rights, there isn’t an easily shared narrative for polyamorous relationships to push. For some people, polyamory looks identical to a traditional closed marriage except with three or four people rather than two. While for other people, polyamory can look like a branching web of relationships, with differing internal dynamics.
The Alterations
Due to Coronavirus and quarantine, Somerville’s city council meeting was done remotely, allowing for an archivable webcast accompanied by all the files and minutes. People all over the country are able to look to Sommerville for a transparent look into what ground-level change can look like for civil rights.
The ordinance document is almost surprising in its simplicity. Three pages split into six sections that reshape and redefine Sommerville’s definition of a family. What’s most remarkable about the story of this document is the last-minute alterations. About an hour before the city council meeting, councilor and author of the ordinance Lance Davis made eight alterations to the ordinance at the prompting of fellow councilor J.T. Scott. These changes include language shifts like “he or she” to “they” and “both” to “all.”
Out of all the shifts in language this ordinance contains, the elimination of the fifth criteria “they are each other’s sole domestic partners” reigns most important. Using genderless language and being grammatically plural is inclusive but this change is the only direct reference that polyamory. This change also grants domestic partnerships in Sommerville more rights than their married counterparts, as bigamy -- the act of being married to more than one person simultaneously -- is still illegal.
Change Makers
Coronavirus is not the only external motivator at play here. 2020 was rife with social unrest and many of these causes often present loudly, where the grandeur of revolution is easy to get lost in. Sweeping change and demonstrations have a certain romance that can’t be conjured by one councilor doing what he sees best for his community. Unfortunately, that undersells the importance of changes like this ordinance. For most of the estimated 15,000,000 people currently in polyamorous relationships in the United States, this ordinance does nothing as they don’t live within its jurisdiction. What this ordinance does is offer recognition. It’s set a precedent that non-traditional families are as deserving of rights traditionally reserved for married couples.
There is a question of efficiency when discussing top-down and bottom-up policymaking. People remember the court cases and the faces at the front of marches. People remember media, movies, and music that they can support. Right now polyamory doesn't have widespread representation or even common name recognition. What it does have is people like J.T. Scott and Lance Davis, people who said why not? And just like that, change gets slipped under the radar.
There is very little good to be said about a Coronavirus. It’s a global pandemic that ravages communities and showcases where our systems of care often fail. But it also, in the case of Sommerville, has the ability to motivate people to protect one another and turn an empathetic eye to people who have historically been left to the shadows. This ordinance, by nature of being motivated by health care access, has also called forward philosophical concerns about who defines a family and how that definition can implicate not only someone’s relationships but also their finances and their livelihoods.
Since this ordinance passed, the first legal recognition of polyamory, there has been very little widespread upset. Traditional families have not crumpled. Moral debauchery has not taken hold. It would seem that for most people life goes on as normally as it can. People wake up every day and do their best to take care of their family, whatever that looks like to them.
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