VL v EL, a ruling handed down by the supreme court on Monday, is not a highly publicized blockbuster. But it’s an important sign of progress for gay and lesbian rights nonetheless. The court quickly dismissed the Alabama supreme court’s attempts to deny parental rights to a same-sex couple. This is the latest example of a fundamental transformation in the rights granted to LGBT people in the United States, with the supreme court shifting from a major barrier to progress to a major instrument progress for gay and lesbian rights.

VL v EL involves a run-of-the-mill custody dispute. A lesbian couple living in Alabama had three children together through the use of reproductive technology. Under Alabama law, same-sex couples did not have parental rights. As a result, VL established temporary residence in Georgia and formally adopted the children, with both VL and EL recognized as legal parents by the Georgia court. The couple broke up in 2011, and subsequently VL claimed that her former partner had denied her access to her children. The matter went to the family court, which granted visitation rights to VL. EL appealed against the decision, making (among others) the argument that the Georgia grant of parental rights was invalid. The Alabama court of civil appeals rejected this argument, while sending the case back to family court to hold an evidentiary hearing.



Enter Roy Moore. The chief justice of the Alabama supreme court – who was once removed from office for defying a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from his court building – isn’t just a rightwing fanatic on church-and-state questions. Earlier this year, Moore ordered the state’s probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, although the state’s ban on same-sex marriage was ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court of the United States in the landmark Obergefell v Hodges ruling. While most of Alabama’s probate judges have properly ignored Moore’s lawless order, it demonstrates Moore’s fierce resistance to the rights of same-sex couples.

Not surprisingly, then, Moore and a majority of his colleagues refused to recognize the parental rights of VL and EL. According to the Alabama supreme court, Georgia did not have the jurisdiction to issue parental rights to the couple, and therefore did not have to recognize them under the “full faith and credit” clause of the constitution (which requires states to respect the “judicial proceedings of every other state”). VL took her case to the supreme court.

In a brief, unsigned, and unanimous six-page opinion, the supreme court overturned the ruling of Moore and his court. The full faith and credit clause clearly requires Alabama to respect the Georgia court’s order. “A State may not disregard the judgment of a sister state,” the court held, “because it disagrees with the reasoning underlying the judgment or deems it to be wrong on the merits.”

This decision has important implications for the rights of LGBT parents. As a brief filed by a collection of adoption agencies explains, if the Alabama supreme court’s decision were allowed to stand, it would present a serious threat to the parental rights of same-sex parents in a majority of states, and give state judges hostile to same-sex marriage a tool to obstruct the rights same-sex parents have.

The quick, unanimous dismissal of the Alabama court, therefore, is important. Even the justices who dissented from the Obergefell ruling were not willing to let Alabama obstruct the rights of same-sex parents, helping to ensure that same-sex couples will have equal parental rights in practice and not just on paper.



This also represents a sea change in how the supreme court has affected the rights of same-sex parents. Some people have dismissed the importance of the supreme court striking down bans on “sodomy” in the 2003 landmark Lawrence v Texas on the grounds that by then such bans were largely symbolic. And it’s true that bans on “sodomy” were rarely directly enforced against consensual private partners. (Ironically, the two plaintiffs in Lawrence almost certainly never had sex with each other.) But this misses the point. The 1986 supreme court decision upholding bans on consensual “sodomy” had far-reaching implications in areas like family law. If same-sex partners could be outright forbidden from having sex with each other, many state courts reasoned, then they could certainly be denied parental rights.

Those days, fortunately, are over. In less than 30 years, the supreme court has changed from being an ally of opponents of the rights of same-sex parents to a strong ally of same-sex parents. This is important progress for basic human rights.