City Is Washington's First to Protect Polyamorous Families

Olympia just quietly stepped into new legal territory in Washington. The state capital has become the first in the state to explicitly bar discrimination against people in polyamorous and other nontraditional family arrangements, adding "diverse family and relationship structures" to its anti-bias and housing rules in a unanimous City Council vote, reports Oregon Public Broadcasting. The change—which advocates say costs the city nothing and simply adds a definition to existing law—protects people in consensually nonmonogamous relationships, alongside single-parent, multigenerational, blended, and chosen families.

"What we're doing is ... putting a new class into the city ordinance next to the other ones ... so that as an Olympia resident, they have expanded civil liberties they didn't have before," council member Robert Vanderpool said earlier this year, per the Olympian. Organizers, including those from the Seattle Coalition for Family & Relationship Equity, say they're pursuing similar measures in Tacoma, Seattle, and beyond, with an eye toward a statewide law, per OPB. They point to reported stigma in housing, jobs, and health care—like being told by a real estate agent that a home "is not for three couples," or by a prospective employer that a job "isn't really appropriate for someone with your kind of lifestyle."

Portland's City Council advanced a related proposal last month, and backers in the state are also preparing "Indigo's Law," which would help unmarried people designate next of kin from their "chosen family," inspired by a Seattle case that ended in a court fight over a woman's burial wishes. "Chosen families take a lot of different forms," says transgender activist Jessa Davis, per the New York Times. "Polyamory isn't just about having sex with multiple people. It's about what your community looks like."