We believe that mediation serves same sex couples particularly well. It doesn't matter whether you are a domestic partner or one of the 14,000 couples that married during the window that existed from June 16, 2008 to November 5, 2008. And, it doesn't matter that Proposition 8 may likely be overturned by the Ninth Circuit Federal Appellate Panel if Judge Walker's August 4, 2010 ruling is upheld in coming months, and so that marriage will finally and forever be opened to gay and lesbian couples in California. You aspired for equality, but not necessarily for the divorce paradigm that the straight population has lived with for more than a century, without great apparent success.
Your experience of partnership dissolution or divorce is going to be different than that of generations of straight couples. Your expectations have been different, and you've been excluded from Family Court from Day 1 until the late 1990's. To pretend that laws that reflect prejudice, or promote or protect gender imbalances, are controlling for the LGBT experience in ways that you can trust to be reliable is a leap to faith that you may not be willing to undertake.
Mediation offers you the ability to customize and design your own experience of relationship breakup, just as you have designed and customized most other aspects of your cultural experience and identity. While what the law says will increasingly play a role in how you make your decisions, the beauty of mediation processes for you is that you already know that what the law says is only one consideration, and one that has not been particularly helpful to you personally. Sure, of course your consent to mediated resolutions must be informed and voluntary and this now requires a full understanding of a rapidly changing legal landscape. But this also means that you can style your own choices according to those values that you hold most deeply, and they need not be what generations of straight people presumed to be their birthright.
Mediation offers people the ability to structure their present and future lives in ways that they determine. At DFMS we are eager to support you in being every bit as creative in ending your relationships as you have been in shaping them. Mediation is particularly well-suited to same sex couples and we are honored to be a part of this brave new world.
Please consider allowing us to help you now through this latest transition. We are legal and mental health experts, and we value dignity, choice, and mutually sustainable self-direction above all else.
Mediation Allows You to Drive Your Dissolution Experience!
DFMS