In October 2014, same-sex couples had their right to legally marry upheld in Wisconsin in Wolf v. Walker, and one year later, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed this right for couples across the country in Obergefell v. Hodges.
The Marriage and Family Equality Act makes technical updates to Wisconsin law to account for marriage equality. The bill changes statutory references from “husband and wife” to instead “spouse” or “spouses” and therefore includes both same-sex and different-sex married couples. This includes changes to areas like recreational licenses and income tax, but also insurance coverage, retirement or death benefits, medical assistance, and parentage and family law.
The bill also clarifies three key aspects of parentage for married couples:
- the right for married couples to jointly adopt children and for one spouse to adopt the other spouse’s child;
- the right for married couples to jointly have a child through artificial insemination of one of the spouses; and
- the presumption that two people who have a child within their marriage are the parents of that child.
