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Mitt Romney Rejected Birth Certificates for Massachusetts Children Born to Same-Sex Couples | Human Rights Campaign
Mitt Romney took unprecedented steps as governor of Massachusetts to discriminate against families headed by same-sex couples, including demanding that his administration personally review every request to revise birth certificates for children born to same-sex parents. According to a report in the Boston Globe, Romney rejected a request from the states Registry of Vital Records and Statistics to revise birth certificate forms to apply to same-sex parents. Instead, Romney insisted his lawyers investigate every single request for birth certificates for children born to same-sex couples. If Romneys team decided a request was worthy of revising a birth certificate, officials could then write-in, by hand, the term second parent on the legal document. In some instances, Romney denied parents proper birth certificates for their children.
The states Department of Public Health warned Romney that his intervention placed children at a disadvantage, particularly later in life as they tried to obtain various forms of identification such as a passport or drivers license, or as they registered to vote. The same DPH official also warned that allowing officials to alter birth certificates by hand as opposed to simply revising the forms, as the states Registry of Vital Records and Statistics had recommended was tantamount to a violation of statutes, and would impair efforts to keep organized state records.
Romney, who has a significant track record of deriding LGBT families and speaking out against relationship recognition, appeared not to care what impact his close oversight of same-sex families had on the law. The Globe reports that emails between Romney officials and the Department of Public Health contained details about the marriages and births of dozens of families.
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