Panel to consider legal fees in same-sex parent rights case

The Idaho Constitutional Defense Council will meet next week to decide whether to comply with a federal court order directing it to pay legal fees stemming from a lawsuit over the rights of same-sex parents.

The council oversees a fund of money created in 1995 to finance Idaho’s legal confrontations with the federal government over state sovereignty. But the fund has been almost exclusively used to cover legal fees when the state is sued over laws that are ultimately found to be unconstitutional.

In January, U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill ordered the state to pay more than $277,000 in legal fees to attorneys for Adela Ayala, an Idaho woman who sued because the state refused to put her name on the birth certificate of a child she had with her same-sex partner.