At press time, a Mississippi judge had just ordered the state to issue a birth certificate for a 5-year-old boy born in Mississippi and adopted by a lesbian couple fromVermont. Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund filed a lawsuit against the state in 2001 for refusing to issue a birth certificate listing Holly Perdue and Cherie Goldstein as the child’s two parents, leaving him without any legal documentation of his name, the names of his parents or the date and place of his birth.
      “This is a very significant victory,” said Greg Nevins, the staff attorney in Lambda Legal’s Atlanta-based Southern Regional Office who handled the case. “This child was punished because his parents are gay. A birth certificate is a basic and important document, and today’s ruling means this young boy should finally have his.”
      Goldstein and Perdue took their son into their Vermont home eight days after he was born. In April 2000, the adoption was finalized in Vermont and the two women asked Mississippi to amend the child’s birth certificate to include his adoptive parents’ names and his new name.
      The Mississippi Board of Health repeatedly denied their requests because the child’s parents are lesbians. In a lawsuit filed in state court, Lambda Legal argued that the state was in violation of its own law requiring officials to honor valid out-of-state adoptions and provide amended birth certificates.
      The ruling comes just a week after a New Jersey court ordered that state to list both lesbian mothers on the birth certificate of a child they intend to raise together. “All across the country – from the Northeast to the Deep South – courts are increasingly recognizing that children with gay parents are entitled to the same protections as every other child,” Nevins said. “Today’s ruling is an important milestone in this trend.”
      Goldstein and Perdue live in central Vermont with their son and other adoptive children. “We have been fighting the battle with Mississippi for 6 years now – trying to get his birth certificate to read the names of both of his parents,” they wrote. “Today we win!”