The “pregnant man” wants a divorce, and says he will take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court now that an Arizona court has refused to give him what he wants. This is the first of many such stories Americans will see as the country throws off the historical definition of marriage, redefining it to be any union of consenting adults.
Thomas Beatie garnered national news as the “pregnant man” who gave birth to a baby in 2008. In reality she is not a man at all. She has had surgery to change her anatomical features above the belt, and hormone treatments to cause her to grow facial hair, but she is genetically a woman and left her uterus, ovaries, and other related features in place, by which she carried a child like any other woman. She is in a lesbian relationship with another woman, Nancy Beatie, and had three children through artificial means.
Beatie married the other woman in Hawaii. But now she’s seeking a divorce in Arizona. Judge Douglas Gerlach of Maricopa County Family Court (the Phoenix area) denied the divorce petition. Arizona has not redefined marriage to recognize gay couples. Judge Gerlach said that as a matter of Arizona law this is a marriage of two women, and therefore he lacks any authority under Arizona law to dissolve such a union.
The case holds broader national lessons on marriage. It’s yet another example that many gay-marriage supporters are not interested in “live and let live.” Here you have someone who is not just genetically still a woman, but anatomically a woman as well. Yet now she demands that a state that only recognizes marriage as one man and one woman must accommodate whatever her demands are to give her the legal outcome she wants. She’s demanding that every person has a right to define their gender apart from their genetic or anatomical features, and that the law and society must cater to whatever she wants as a result.
Beatie may not realize it, but her news story and threat to take this all the way through the Arizona court system and then to the U.S. Supreme Court actually makes it more likely that the justices of the High Court will rule that there is no right to gay marriage in the U.S. Constitution, and leave this issue to the fifty sovereign states to decide on an individual level. We’ll likely find out the outcome in the gay marriage cases in late June.
Breitbart News legal columnist Ken Klukowski is on faculty at Liberty University School of Law.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.