President Obama released guidelines for hospitals that accept Medicare or Medicaid (which is the vast majority of hospitals) regarding visitation. Now people will be allowed to designate anyone to visit them in a hospital in the same way that a recognized family member can. That's an advance for the gay and lesbian community. It should prevent situations such as the one in Miami in which a lesbian's wife/partner and children were denied the right to visit her for several hours as she was dying.
For our family, this is good news as well. In California we are recognized as married, so visitation should not be a problem here. But when we visited my parents in Georgia recently, we brought along a folder with copies of our important paperwork - our marriage license (not that it's recognized in Georgia), durable powers of attorney for health care so that we can make medical decisions for each other, and our son Leo's adoption paperwork, because you never know when some redneck police officer will challenge two gay men travelling with a six year old. It's unfortunate that he have to do that, but we prefer to play it safe in potentially hostile places like Georgia.
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Sad that you have to do that - but good that you're prepared. Luckily things are moving in the correct direction (I hesitate to say right direction). Slow as that may be.
ReplyDelete@NewLeaf - yes, there is progress. I'm just impatient, I guess.
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