BILL ANALYSIS Ó
SB 1005
Page 1
SENATE THIRD READING
SB
1005 (Jackson)
As Amended June 6, 2016
Majority vote
SENATE VOTE: 35-2
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|Committee |Votes|Ayes |Noes |
| | | | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
|----------------+-----+----------------------+--------------------|
|Judiciary |8-0 |Mark Stone, Wagner, | |
| | |Burke, Chau, Chiu, | |
| | |Cristina Garcia, | |
| | |Holden, Ting | |
| | | | |
| | | | |
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SUMMARY: Replaces "husband" and "wife" with "spouse."
Specifically, this bill:
1)Replaces "husband" and "wife" with "spouse."
2)Clarifies that "spouse" includes registered domestic partners
SB 1005
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throughout the codes.
EXISTING LAW:
1)Provides that marriage is a personal relation arising out of a
civil contract between two persons. (Family Code Section 300.
Unless stated otherwise, all further statutory provisions are
to that code.)
2)Provides that registered domestic partners have the same
rights, protections, and benefits and are subject to the same
responsibilities, obligations, and duties under law, whether
they derive from statutes, administrative regulations, court
rules, government policies, common law, or any other
provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and imposed
upon spouses. Also applies to former domestic partners and
surviving domestic partners. (Section 297.5.)
FISCAL EFFECT: None.
COMMENTS: This bill continues a decades-long effort to allow
same-sex couples to marry in California. While California and
the entire United States now recognize the rights of same-sex
couples to marry (Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 135 S. Ct. 2584;
Hollingsworth v. Perry (2013) 133 S. Ct. 2652), the codes have
not fully caught up to the law, and this bill seeks to move that
process forward by replacing the terms "husband" and "wife" with
the gender neutral term "spouse" throughout the codes.
This Bill Seeks to Update the Codes to Reflect Current Law: For
unrepresented individuals, understanding the law and complex
legal processes is often very difficult and can be nearly
impossible when statutes do not reflect the actual law.
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Updating the statutes will help ensure that someone reading the
California codes will have an accurate understanding of the law.
California's courts have long interpreted the code to apply
neutrally regarding gender in an effort to accommodate the
evolution of the nuclear family. In order to best protect
parties and their children, courts recognize that in many
families traditional gender-stereotypes cease to exist: more
mothers are breadwinners, more fathers are primary caretakers,
and many same-sex couples are raising children. To that end, in
2013 the Legislature updated statutory terms within the Uniform
Parentage Act to conform with case law and other statutory
provisions, including changing "presumed father" to "presumed
parent," and replacing "father" and "mother" with "parent."
(See AB 1403 (Committee on Judiciary), Chapter 510, Statutes of
2013.) In addition, the Legislature enacted SB 1306 (Leno),
Chapter 82, Statutes of 2014, which deleted references to
"husband" or "wife" in the Family Code and instead referred to a
"spouse." Similarly, this bill would update the remaining codes
to accurately reflect California law.
Domestic Partners are Included Under "Spouses." While this bill
only replaces "husband" and "wife" with the word "spouse,"
spouse also includes domestic partners. California's domestic
partnership laws provide that registered domestic partners have
the "same rights, protections, and benefits, and shall be
subject to the same responsibilities, obligations, and duties
under law, whether they derive from statutes, administrative
regulations, court rules, government policies, common law, or
any other provisions or sources of law, as are granted to and
imposed upon spouses." (Section 297.5.) Similarly, former
registered domestic partners and surviving registered domestic
partners have the same rights as former spouses and surviving
spouses. (Id.) Thus, whenever the term "spouse" is used in the
codes it also includes registered domestic partners.
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To make that more clear to non-lawyers, this bill adds
clarifying definitional language to each code that includes the
term "spouse" to refer to Section 297.5 and make clear that
"spouse" includes a registered domestic partner.
Analysis Prepared by:
Leora Gershenzon / JUD. / (916) 319-2334 FN:
0003413