Glenn Wright, chairman of the Summit County Democratic Party and my opponent in the current election, wrote last week in The Park Record that my views on same-sex marriage should "disqualify [me] from further representation of this district."

I was surprised by Mr. Wright's extreme statement because I have publicly reaffirmed that I support the rights of legally-married same-sex couples to joint inheritance, employment benefits, pensions, tax filing, medical treatment, and health insurance, in the same manner as these legal rights are enjoyed by opposite-sex couples.

Where Mr. Wright and I differ, apparently, is in his belief that laws regarding reproduction and parenthood should be exactly the same for gay couples, lesbian couples and heterosexual couples. I maintain that laws for these different types of relationships will naturally be different, due to the inherent biological distinctions between each of these unions.

For example, current Utah law provides that when a child is born to a married woman, the man to whom she is married is legally presumed to be the child's parent. But when a child is born to a woman in a same-sex marriage, I am hesitant to impose upon her spouse a similar automatic presumption of parental rights and responsibilities over that child, unless the spouse has affirmatively agreed in advance to become the parent of that child.

Surrogacy laws are another area of difference. Utah law provides that surrogacy arrangements are valid only when the "intended mother" is unable to reproduce. Two married men who wish to become parents will obviously need a different law to apply to them.

Adoption also presents different questions for same-sex couples. Utah law requires a natural parent of a child to terminate his or her own parental rights before another adult can adopt the child. With same-sex marriage, however, some couples may wish to preserve the parental relationship with the opposite-sex parent when the unrelated same-sex spouse adopts the child.

None of these, or many other, questions regarding same-sex marriage will be easy to answer, but the Utah legislature will need to answer them by thoughtfully considering and passing new laws. Unlike differences of race, differences of gender produce different results regarding parenthood that the law must address, and reasonable people can disagree on the specific policies the legislature may pass to resolve these questions.

People who disagree with the passage of particular legislative policies will go to court to challenge those policies. This will likely lead to an era of litigation by all sides, similar to what our country experienced with the abortion case of Roe v. Wade. In that case, the court had to balance the right to life of unborn children with the right of women to obtain an abortion. The court ended up with a compromise position, which allows prohibition of abortion in some situations but not in others.

In the realm of same-sex parenting, the courts will be balancing the rights of children to be raised by their natural parents with the rights of adults to become parents through artificial means. The courts will also likely be asked to consider the right of children to have gender diversity among their parents, and the extent of a state's authority to protect that right.

I will approach all of these line-drawing questions with an open mind, for I cannot believe that either side has no good points to make. As with the abortion laws that followed Roe v. Wade, I hope the answers will end up falling somewhere in the middle and not on the extremes, in order to strike a reasonable balance of public policy on this important topic.

The post Guest Editorial: Incumbent candidate Powell takes issue with challenger Wright on same sex marriage appeared first on Park Record.

Utah state statutes dealing with marriage currently contain many references that conflict with a policy of same-sex marriage. For example, the heading of the entire area of the Utah Code dealing with marriage is entitled "Husband and Wife." Other phrases that occur frequently with regard to marriage are "man and woman" and "father and mother."

I have opened a bill file in the Utah legislature to review and revise the more than 700 references to marriage relationships contained in Utah Code, as needed to comply with the recent orders of the federal courts. Many of these revisions will be technical in nature, such as replacing the words "husband" or "wife" with "spouse."

Other changes are more complex and will require policy choices that recognize the inherent differences between same-sex and opposite-sex marriages, especially with regard to the bearing of children.

For example, current law provides that when a child is born to a married woman, the man to whom she is married is legally presumed to be the child's parent. In rewriting this statute, the legislature will need to decide if, in this circumstance, the female spouse of a mother in a same-sex marriage will, or will not, be automatically presumed to have parental rights over the child.

Another example is that one of the requirements to create a valid contract for surrogacy is that the "intended mother" must show that she is unable to bear a child, or will suffer unreasonable health risks if she does. It seems that the legislature will need to craft an exception to this requirement if it intends to grant to male same-sex couples the opportunity to become parents through surrogacy contracts.

As I studied these types of statutes over the past few months, I realized that the biological fact that same-sex couples, by definition, will not produce children through natural reproduction calls for, in many cases, different regulations pertaining to same-sex marriages than to opposite sex-marriages, as shown by the above examples.

To mark these distinctions, I had proposed to call traditional marriage by its traditional name, marriage, and same-sex marriage by the name "pairage." In doing so, I was also responding to the views expressed to me by several of my constituents that same-sex unions and opposite-sex unions are conceptually different in some respects and so should be called by different names.

In the few days since I shared this terminology publicly, many citizens have told me that they found the term "pairage" offensive because it seemed to imply that it was legally inferior to traditional marriage. Although that was not my intention, I am sensitive to this sincere feedback that I have received from citizens, and so, to honor their requests, I will abandon any attempt to include this terminology in the legislation I am drafting.

From now on, where relevant, I will simply refer to the concepts as same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage, and where circumstances dictate, I will also distinguish between female same-sex marriage and male same-sex marriage.

I hope that the realization I have gained through my recent review of the complexities of marriage law will remain evident to the legislature and the citizens of our state.

To restate, this realization is that same-sex marriage and opposite-sex marriage are different from each other in certain ways, and that these differences should be acknowledged and observed in order to create rational policies to regulate the new marriage landscape ushered in by the federal courts.

Marriage equality does not mean marriage identity, and so, unlike in the realm of racial equality, there may be instances in which different regulations, rights and responsibilities can and should apply to each distinct type of marriage.

I welcome continued constructive feedback from citizens as the legislature incorporates the new and unique concept of same-sex marriage into Utah law.

The post Guest Editorial: It’s time for a new word to define same-sex partnerships appeared first on Park Record.