Olivia Shelltrack finally has her dream home. Her family moved into the five-bedroom, three-bath frame house in Black Jack last month. But now she fears she and her fiance face uprooting their children because of a city ordinance that says her household fails to meet Black Jack's definition of a family.
Shelltrack and Fondray Loving, her boyfriend of 13 years, were denied an occupancy permit because of an ordinance forbidding three or more individuals from living together if they are not related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The couple have three children, ages 8, 10 and 15, although Loving is not the biological father of the oldest child.
"I was basically told, you can have one child living in your house if you're not married, but more than that, you can't," she said.
This law is actually one that I've heard of before. As you Lubbockites may know, such a law exists in Lubbock as well, although it's more typically described as a "brothel law" down there. Apparently laws of this sort have multiple uses.
In fact, I've heard that South Bend has one, too.
Of course, something they don't discuss in the article is that these laws are also legal loopholes to discriminate against gays or discourage them from adopting (where such loopholes are necessary, anyway). I experienced manifestations of these laws myself as discrimination against college students, who were forced into the ghettos because they were the only places with homes we could afford between just 2 of us, even though some nicer areas had larger homes that 3 or more of us could've afforded together (and we wouldn't have had to deal with our cars getting broken into every couple of months).
Such a brilliant law, so versatile in its ability to screw so many people all at once!
(and by the way, did any of y'all catch the color of the woman vis-a-vis her children? Ya think that might have something to do with her getting nailed by this law? Just sayin'.)
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