Berkeley passed a new law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of relationship and family structure Tuesday, creating some of the first legal protections for people in non-normative relationships.
The law applies to polyamorous couples and families, as well as single-parent and multi-generational households — anything outside of a monogamous couple and nuclear family structure.
“We see polyamory as one of many stigmatized forms of building relationship and family against the backdrop of a culture that really sets you up to ‘couple,’” said Lily Lamboy, co-founder of Modern Family Institute.
The law adds family and relationship structure as a protected class, like race or gender, to Berkeley law, protecting people in diverse relationships and families from discrimination in housing, businesses and city services.
Federal law has long prohibited discrimination on the basis of race and gender. Now, if a household with polyamorous parents is denied housing on the basis of their family structure, they can take the landlord to court.
Lamboy is in a polyamorous marriage, lives in an eight-person co-op house in the Berkeley Hills and helps parent the child of a single mother. Through Modern Family Institute, they work on building societal acceptance of a range of relationships and family structures like theirs.
Family structures like Lamboy’s are becoming increasingly common. About 5% of people are in consensual non-monogamous relationships, and about 1 in 5 people will engage in such relationships throughout their lifetime.
Dave Doleshal, one of the directors and co-founders of the World Polyamory Association, began organizing conferences on polyamory in Berkeley at a time when it was less accepted than it is today. “Usually people would seem to be open to just about any other kind of thing,” he said.
Being open about his polyamorous identity, he was often turned down by landlords. At conferences, he heard stories of people being evicted, fired or passed up for promotions at work based on their relationship structure. With other polyamorous people, he considered advocating for a law to protect their rights, but didn’t get far.
Over time, Doleshal has seen polyamory and other diverse relationships become more accepted in Berkeley. “People who were polyamorous a long time ago, just gradually have started talking about it and being more visible,” said Doleshal, who has lived in Berkeley since the 1990s. He said the ordinance was a major step forward, making other legal protections possible.
The law covers relationships and family structures of all forms, from an asexual person raising a child with a romantic couple to a pair of roommates who are platonically dating. It also includes single parents, who also face discrimination in housing, government benefits and other areas.
Brett Chamberlin, who runs OPEN, the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy, said the growing prevalence of non-normative relationships is part of a historical liberation movement that includes the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws and the gay rights movement.
“We’ve made a lot of headway in terms of who can be in a relationship. And what we’re now starting to shift the conversation to is, how do we allow relationships and families to be structured?” Chamberlin said, referencing an idea from Modern Family Institute’s co-founder, Heath Schechinger.
The laws have come with their share of opposition from the right. The California Family Council, a Christian-based organization, opposes any relationship structures that deviate from the nuclear family.
“The push by Berkeley and Oakland to formalize polyamorous families is cultural suicide,” Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council, said in a statement. “History and experience have shown children thrive best in nuclear father, mother, and child families. A civilization that rejects this biblical model for family life, is hell-bent on its own destruction.”
The ordinance was introduced by Councilmember Terry Taplin and co-sponsored by Councilmembers Cecilia Lunaparra and Mark Humbert. It passed unanimously Tuesday, making Berkeley the fifth city in the country to extend these protections to polyamorous people and others.
The first city to pass a similar anti-discrimination law was Somerville, Massachusetts. In April, Oakland passed a similar law.
“As a queer person myself, I’m so happy to co-sponsor this and happy to celebrate love and commitment in all of its forms,” Lunaparra said at the city council meeting. “This is a step towards making our city inclusive to non-nuclear and non-heteronormative relationships and families.”
After Berkeley ordinance, advocates set sights on state
The Berkeley law has limited purview. It doesn’t extend to other areas where polyamorous people face discrimination, including the workplace and courts, which would need to be addressed at the state or county level.
Two-thirds of polyamorous people say they have experienced some discrimination based on their identity, including employment discrimination, family rejection and difficulty accessing supportive mental healthcare. It’s especially common for polyamorous people to hide having multiple partners at work for fear of being fired.
“We know people who have lost custody hearings because their partner outed them in court and the judge ruled against them as an unstable and unsafe parent, because they had a nontraditional relationship structure,” Lamboy’s husband, Alexei Savtchenko, said.
“It just comes from a way of looking at where these are all branches of infidelity. It’s the model that’s true legally, that’s true clinically,” he said.
Advocates behind the new law said they hope it starts conversations about the way that monogamy and the nuclear family structure are baked into the legal and social fabric, from healthcare benefits to hospital rules. Eventually, they aim to bring a nondiscrimination bill to the California state legislature.
“It’s wild that we created all of our legal systems, all of our social stories, around this one very specific paradigm of how to love people. There’s so many other ways that people can and are wanting to do that,” Lamboy said.
