Have a Good Holiday!

No Weekly Political Roundup this week, as I’m spending the time with my family for the holiday, and I suspect few of you will be around either.

Have a good holiday, if you’re celebrating it!

Money from My Honey

This morning’s post is a shameless plug for a couple of posts by my spouse, who writes about finance at her own blog and at Queercents.

In Creative Personal Economic Stimulus: Boston’s Bounty Bucks, she discusses a nice idea for vouchers that turn $10 of regular food stamps into $20 to spend at the local farmers’ market. She also gives a shout-out to the farmer’s market in Madison, Wisconsin, the city where we met and which just extended domestic partnership benefits to same-sex couples.

She then discusses whether title insurance is worth buying. Before you run screaming at such a topic, I’ll observe that she manages to turn even that dry matter into something interesting (okay, maybe not as interesting as, say, the new season of Weeds), and that’s one of the many reasons I love her. Along the way, she makes her own call for a little piece of financial reform.

Nothing LGBT-specific to any of that. What with money being power, however, the smarter we can be with ours, the more power we’ll have as a community. It pays—monetarily and otherwise—to educate ourselves on financial matters.

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 74

Helen and I share a favorite toy from our son’s recent birthday collection, and give a demo of its projectile-launching fun. We then offer some suggestions for kids’ birthday parties and ask viewers to weigh in on gendered gift items.

(If the embedded video above doesn’t work for you, try it here.)

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.

Destiny Is Not Biology’s Child

Once again, Nancy Polikoff is making me think this week. Yesterday, she managed to inform us of why media treatment of Michael Jackson may indeed have a direct impact on LGBT families:

The news reports this morning about the circumstances of the conception of Michael Jackson’s children are suggesting that the information might impact who gets custody of the children. But that just shows ignorance about the difference between legal parenthood and biology. They do not always go together and there is nothing new about that.

That comes on the same day that The Linster at After Ellen reports on The Kids Are All Right, an upcoming movie starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as lesbian moms. When their oldest child turns 18, she meets their sperm donor, and family tensions ensue. Read the rest of this post »

Cheese and Roses

Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle (D) signed a bill yesterday that allows same-sex couples to register as domestic partners and thus gain certain rights like hospital visitation and survivor benefits. As an erstwhile Cheesehead, who met my now-spouse while we were both graduate students at UW-Madison, this comes as happy news.

Wisconsin is, in fact, the first state to offer such benefits after enacting a constitutional amendment that bans both marriages and civil unions for same-sex couples. Let’s review:

• A domestic partnership in Wisconsin offers limited rights, but civil unions are unconstitutional.
• In New Jersey, civil unions are the same as domestic partnerships in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
• In California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, domestic partnerships are equivalent to marriages in all but name.
• New Jersey domestic partnerships are still around, however, for same- or opposite-sex couples over 62 years old, and for those who registered before February 19, 2007. They get an extensive but not marriage-equivalent set of rights and benefits.

Would Wisconsin recognize a California domestic partnership, but not a New Jersey civil union, which is equivalent in all but name? Would they recognize California domestic partnerships of same-sex couples, but not the marriages of the 18,000 couples who wed there before Prop 8 was upheld? That old line about roses doesn’t quite seem to hold.

Yes, I know a lawyer could tell me the answers. Point is, though, one would need a lawyer to do so. I’m thinking of inventing a secret decoder ring that translates one’s relationship status into whatever it happens to be in that state. Of course, in most states it would still come up blank.

Much as this makes me grumble, though, I do find something satisfying in the fact that a state with constitutional bans like Wisconsin has made as much progress as it has. On, Wisconsin.

LGBT Parenting Roundup

A compilation of what other people have been saying about LGBT families:

Personal stories:

• CNN.com has a must-read article on the perspective of children growing up with gay parents. Thanks to Abigail Garner, one of their interviewees, for the tip. (And if you haven’t read her book, Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, do get it. I recommend it for all LGBT parents and their teen/adult children.)
• The gay couple who were the first in Britain to have both names on their children’s birth certificates are now expecting their fourth and fifth children. In 1999, the couple used donor eggs and a surrogate mother in the U.S. to have twins, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling the pair could both be named as parents on the children’s birth certificates. They also have a five-year-old son.
• The Washington Post reports on the gay and lesbian families in Prince George’s County, Maryland and the suburbanization of gay and lesbian families generally. Much as I myself am, unbelievably, a suburban-mom dyke and happy with my life, I hope some of us have lifestyles that differ. Variety being the spice, and all that.
• A couple in Sweden is attempting to raise their child (now two-and-a-half years old) without gender norms. They do not use a gendered name or pronouns, and have kept the child’s biological sex a secret. While I’m all for raising a child without gender norms, I also don’t think it is right to teach children that their gender is anything to be kept secret or be ashamed of. Besides, I think all their best intentions will go astray when the child starts school.

School issues:

• Victoria Cruz and Deoine Scott were voted “Best Couple” by their peers at Mott Haven Village Preparatory (Public) High School in the Bronx, the first time in the school’s history a same-sex couple had been chosen (and maybe the first time in Bronx history, too).
• The head of a high school English department in Litchfield, N.H., is quitting after some parents complained about reading assignments issued by another teacher in a class unit called “Love/Gender/Family,” part of an elective English class for juniors and seniors. They objected to stories on “homosexuality, abortion, drugs, and cannibalism,” including I Like Guys by David Sedaris, The Crack Cocaine Diet by Laura Lippman, Survivor Type by Stephen King, and Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway.

Read the rest of this post »

Welcome, Washington Post Readers!

Welcome, readers from the Washington Post On Parenting blog! I hope you’ll have a look around. My vision for this site has always been to offer news, analysis, and resources for lesbian moms and other LGBT parents, but also to welcome allies and those who want to learn more about our lives. LGBT parents face some unique challenges and some in common with other non-traditional families, but we also share many challenges—and joys—with parents of all types.

Please also feel free to sign up for a once-daily e-mail digest of Mombian posts, join the Mombian Facebook Group, follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to my RSS feed. It’s all about community and communication.

To my regular readers: Stacey Garfinkle, the editor of WaPo’s On Parenting blog, was kind enough to ask me to do a guest post for her site. The piece, “‘He Has Two Moms,’” is up now. I hope you’ll pop over and have a read, leave a comment, and check out some of her other posts on this common journey of raising kids.

40 Years and Counting

On June 28, 1969, a group of LGBT people fought back against a police raid at the Stonewall Inn in New York City.

In many ways, it was the beginning of the LGBT civil rights movement—but if there’s anything I’ve learned as an erstwhile historian, it’s that beginnings are seldom as clear cut as they first appear. One cannot often reduce such broad social changes to a single event, catalyzing as it may have been.

Joan Nestle, who founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1975, perhaps said it best when she wrote:

I certainly don’t see gay and lesbian history starting with Stonewall . . .  and I don’t see resistance starting with Stonewall. What I do see is a historical coming together of forces, and the sixties changed how human beings endured things in this society and what they refused to endure. . . . Certainly something special happened on that night in 1969, and we’ve made it more special in our need to have what I call a point of origin . . . it’s more complex than saying that it all started with Stonewall.

(In The Question of Equality: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America since Stonewall, ed. David Deitcher.)

We are at another coming together of forces in LGBT rights, I believe, a confluence of awareness, activism, and impatience that may serve as a historical milestone for those looking back in another 40 years. We build on the achievements of our predecessors, and we hope to leave the world a little better for our children and their peers.

A joyous Pride to all of you.

Yet Another Non-Bio Mom Wins Custody Appeal

This just in:

More good news for non-bio moms, to add to the Jenkins-Miller decision I posted about earlier: A California Court of Appeal has denied the latest appeal (PDF) of Kristina S., a biological, “ex-lesbian” mom who has been trying since 2004 to prevent her former partner Charisma R. from being declared a legal parent to the child they planned, conceived, and began to raise together. Kristina was represented by the ultra-conservative Liberty Counsel.

Charisma left a comment on my Enough Already post a few months ago. She wrote:

[Kristina] moved away to Texas when our daughter was 3 and until this past year I hadn’t seen our daughter since she was 5 months old. Like Isabella, our daughter turned a year older this April - she is now 6. I am now a legal parent (have been since she was 3) and have court-ordered visitation in Houston, where they moved. My ex is currently challenging everything that has been thusfar determined by the courts and custody evaluations, etc with an appeal (the 3rd in this case already), which I attended yesterday.

Today’s ruling is the outcome of that appeal. It’s good to see the court upheld Charisma’s parenthood. Best wishes to her and her daughter.

After the jump, an excerpt from today’s ruling so you can see what she has been through. My own child, like hers, is also six—which makes this particularly poignant to me. Read the rest of this post »

Weekly Political Roundup

Federal news dominated this week:

• The Senate Judiciary committee held a hearing on the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Attorney General Eric Holder gave a statement in support. There is some buzz that the Act will be attached to the Defense Authorization bill, which happened to a previous version of the bill and helped kill it.
• Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Jared Polis (D-CO) along with eight other House members reintroduced a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that includes protections for LGBT people.
• The White House press secretary said there will be no stop order to prevent dismissals of military personnel under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell because the administration wants a “durable legislative solution.”
• The Department of Justice’s response to GLAD’s DOMA lawsuit had been due Monday, June 29, but has been postponed. GLAD explains: “Per agreement between the parties (but still waiting court approval which is a virtual certainty) we will be filing an amended complaint in late July. It will include all of our tax plaintiffs, reflect the fact that the Toneys are no longer plaintiffs because their issue has been resolved, and perhaps make some other changes. The government’s response will be due on September 18, or 45 days after our amended complaint is filed.” Read the rest of this post »