Politics makes for strange bedfellows, and sometimes even stranger enemies, as lesbian North Carolina State Senator Julia Boseman discovered.  Julia’s estranged partner, Melissa Ann Jarrell, gave birth to their child in 2002.  In 2005 Boseman adopted the child so they could both be legal parents.  But two years later, the couple parted ways and Jarrell sought to invalidate Boseman’s adoption on the grounds that North Carolina did not allow gay adoption.

North Carolina has no law preventing gays and lesbians from adopting, but, as Jarrell argued, there was certainly no law saying that they could.

Judge Wanda Bryant disagreed and upheld Boseman’s parental rights, saying gender is not a factor in adoption matters, at least as far as North Carolina is concerned.

Jarrell argues that the adoption court “had no statutory authority to enter [a] same-sex Adoption Decree,” and thus acted in excess of its jurisdiction. … While acknowledging that such issues are matters of great public interest and of personal significance to Boseman and Jarrell, we emphasize that the specific nature of the parties’ relationship or marital status was not relevant to resolution of  the instant appeal. The same result would have been reached had the parties been an unmarried heterosexual couple.