Anderson said she would file a divorce complaint on behalf of a man who married his partner more than years ago in Illinois. The couple has lived in Ohio and the county long enough to satisfy jurisdictional requirements for divorce filings, though the county’s paperwork may need to be reworded to reflect the changing times.
An employee in Anderson’s office said Wednesday the filing will be ready after the client submits some required forms and pays filing fees.
Anderson said there has been a couple of gay divorce filings the past couple years in Montgomery County, but that they weren’t allowed to go through. She said only Franklin and Lucas counties in Ohio have allowed same-sex couples to dissolve marriages in the past three years.
“I imagine they’re going to start coming in not only in my office, but attorneys all in the area,” Anderson said.
Other local family law attorneys say the change may lead to more clients, but also will clear up some legal issues and muddy others.
“It opens the pool for divorce attorneys to actually begin to do same-sex marriage divorces,” said Rob Scott, a divorce attorney and Kettering city council member who said the nation’s divorce rate is above 50 percent. “The odds are that will translate into same-sex marriages as well.
“You’re gonna see law firms that (will) probably … specialize in same-sex divorces. I can see that here in a couple months.”
Divorce attorney Michelle Maciorowski said she was a juvenile court magistrate for 12 years and presided over cases where same-sex couples fought over children and money.
“We saw a lot of situations where you would have same-sex couples who had no legal mechanism once they split up to deal with custody or financial issues when they’d been entwined,” Maciorowski said. “So, as far as that goes, I think it’s great that we now have a legal mechanism for these long-term relationships to split up their financial issues as well as the custody issues.
“You would have one parent with absolutely no rights, legal rights, to a child, because it was a single-parent adoption or one was the birth parent.”
Divorce attorney Anne Harvey, whose clients are mostly men, said she can see questions arising about domestic partnerships among same-sex couples.
“Whenever there’s a change of this magnitude, there’s going to be litigation about it,” Harvey said. “For whatever reason, somebody, somewhere is a domestic partner and they’re not going to want to get married. Once it’s marriage, Ohio Revised Code defines marriages with duties and obligations.”
Other issues attorneys raised include retirement benefits, tax filing, health-care directives and military retirement orders.
“I think a lot of the federal issues as the retirement and the military benefits and health insurance, all of that, is going to take a while to change,” Maciorowski said. “But I think that those institutions are going to be ready to do that.”
Divorce attorney Kate Bowling said the decision is huge for custodial issues and that she knows plenty of same-sex couples who are wonderful parents.
“I have heard naysayers say that our divorce rates are going to spike in a few years once all these same-sex couples realize what it’s like to be married,” Bowling said. “I think that’s laughable.”
Scott, also the Dayton Tea Party founder and former Montgomery County Republican Party chair, said that as a Christian he believes a marriage is between a man and a woman. But he said that politically, the change was inevitable given the world’s and country’s changing views.
“I think the Republican party is probably going to have to move towards more accepting it,” Scott said. “You do have the Christian right that doesn’t believe (in) it and feels that really the government should protect the sanctity of marriage, but now it’s the law of the land. The Supreme Court has ruled. We have to deal with it.”
Harvey supports the court’s ruling.
“I’m happy about it,” she said. “Not because I’m looking for more business — there’s plenty of divorce and custody and paternity cases already. I think the Supreme Court made the right decision. It’s a step forward. It’s exciting.”
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