Lorie Hutchinson can't marry her lesbian partner Chris Johnson. She can't adopt Johnson's 12-year-old daughter, Olivia White.

In short, she says, she can't defend her family with a simple legal document that automatically affords more than 1,000 legal protections and responsibilities — a marriage license.

Hutchinson and other gay and lesbian couples say it could get worse after the Nov. 2 election. That's why the couple is working overtime to convince voters that Amendment 3, a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriage in Utah, would further solidify the state's discrimination against their family.

"I don't have any rights," Johnson said. "This doesn't take away my rights because I have no rights as a lesbian. . . . Right now we're not a (legal) family; we're roommates with a child."

The couple can piecemeal together some legal protections such as a will, powers of attorney or hospital visitation rights. But they and other opponents to the proposed amendment say it threatens even those existing protections.

"All it takes is one blood relative," Hutchinson notes, to challenge a will or other legal contract she and her partner have entered into.

Their family isn't the only one fearing that the amendment would forever bar them from the same legal protections that married, heterosexual families have.

They're among an estimated 2,568 with children, headed by same-sex unmarried partners in Utah, according to an analysis of the 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Sample by Pam Perlich, senior research economist at the University of Utah Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

The sample data suggested that some 66 percent of the roughly 3,912 same-sex partner-headed households are raising children.

Children in these families are particularly vulnerable when it comes to their parents' divorce or death, because Utah's adoption law only allows married couples and single adults to adopt, said attorney Jane Marquardt, a board member of Equality Utah.

Johnson's daughter, Olivia White, a seventh-grader in the West High School honors program, knows she's vulnerable. And she's just as outspoken an advocate for her family as are her moms. She's speaking out wherever the opportunity presents itself — at school, at TRAX stations, even door-to-door.

"I think it's really important that kids my age know how it affects people," White said.