Tonight begins the first of Seven Straight Nights for Civil Rights, a coordinated campaign of overnight vigils led by straight allies across the nation who will “come out” as supporters of equal rights for LGBT Americans. Atticus Circle and Soulforce are organizing the events, important opportunities to show that support for LGBT rights extends beyond the LGBT community. Visit the Seven Straight Nights site for more details and to learn how people can get involved. (You may also want to check out my interview with Atticus Circle founder Anne S. Wynne.)
In honor of the occasion, I’m going to share a few of the posts contributed by non-LGBT allies for Blogging for LGBT Families Day back in June. I hadn’t re-read them in a while, and found myself marveling again at the outpouring of support from outside the LGBT community—though “outside” seems too black-and-white a term to use for people whose acceptance and understanding crosses so many boundaries. Read them and take heart.
I believe in GLBT families because I believe in children having families.
I believe in GLBT families because I believe in equal rights of all types.
But mostly I believe in GLBT families because of Angela. . . .Angela (don’t call her Angie) lived with her daddy, her papa, and her brother Eddie. They had a big pale blue house right on the waterfront in the small town where I did my seminary internship. . . .
And when Daddy adopted Eddie and Papa adopted Angela , the little family was complete. The day after Eddie’s adoption was legalized in the US, Daddy and Papa brought their offspring to the church to be ‘bap-a-tized’ in Angela’s words. . . .
Because Angela was 4, she got to answer some of her own baptismal questions. The pastor crawled down to her level and interviewed her. He skipped the microphone. Only a few of us could hear her voice, at first.
“Do you want to be baptized?”
“YES!”
“Why do you want to be baptized?”
“I love Jesus”
“Do you want to be in the church family?”
“uh-huh.”Silence.
“Daddy and Papa and Eddie and Me and Jesus, too. That’s our family.”
The pastor broke into a huge grin.
“And you can be in the family, too,” she offered.
Then she shouts,
“Everyone can be in our family!”. . . . Every time I baptize a child, I remember Angela and Eddie and their parents, little Angela that showed us all that there’s plenty of room in the family of God.
Why blog for Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender families?
Because mine could be one.
That’s it.I want for all families what I want for my own.
I want for all children what I want for my own.Love, acceptance and support.
J and S are fantastic parents to this baby. They worry and fret, and love and kiss. This baby loves life like I love ice cream—which is to say a whole, whole lot. They are a perfect family. Perfect in their love, beauty, grace, humor, imperfections and foibles.
And there is no but. There is no “except.” Don’t dare tell me that they are perfect “except” for there “not being a dad” in the family. You know what? I have a dad. I love my dad very, very much. But he didn’t parent me better or worse because of testosterone. He parented me different than my mother. The same way that any two people are going to parent differently. Just because you and I have vaginas does not mean we are the same kind of mothers. That’s ludicrous. What matters is love. And I dare you to find any mothers who love their child more than J and S. All I did to get my beautiful children was a little bow-chicka-bow-bow. They walked through fire. And they continue to walk through fire every day to raise this beautiful baby girl. How dare anyone question that. And if that’s you? Don’t even look at them. Don’t even look at these women, this family. You are not good enough to look at them. They are too beautiful for your eyes.
it’s important for us to be allies to other families that are non-traditional. whether it is a single parent household, a blended family, an adoptive family, a family with two mothers, two fathers or any mixed up version of any of these, we all need to help shape people’s expectations. we all know that families come in many different shapes and sizes. and we are all responsible for helping to change people’s expectations.
a long time ago when i had a summer job that involved cold-calling parents and guardians of infants, i got in a small bit of trouble when i asked if i could speak to “the mother or father of baby so-and-so.” in fact, baby so-and-so was being raised by two moms who called my lab back to complain about my choice of words. it helped me realize that i shouldn’t expect that every child is being raised by a mother and a father living together.
so, the next time you need to refer to a child’s parents or guardians, please think about the words you and choosing and what they say about your expectations about what it means to be a family.
We are not a LGBT family. We have friends that are. One day I might be the mother of a person in the LGBT community. If it were your son or daughter, how would you want them to be treated? Hopefully better than I have seen some people treat members of the LGBT community. If we learn tolerance and love within ourselves for those things/people/cultural differences that we encounter, then the whole world will be a better place. There really is no need for any more anger and hate in the world. What we really need is more love and respect. So, if you don’t have kids, learn to embrace the different folks of the world, and if you have kids, teach them to be open minded and to live without preformed prejudice. Who knows, one day your child might grow up to fall in love with someone from a group outside your norm and then where would you be?
At the request of a fellow blogger I admire . . . I decided today was the best time ever to talk about being LDS and NOT being anti-gay.
. . . . My hubby and I have been married for almost 27! years. How does two men or two women, or one man and four women threaten the institution of marriage? In my eyes it doesn’t. No one can threaten my marriage except for myself and Bald Man.
I feel very strongly that families need to be protected. And when I say family, I mean any group of people who are choosing to live and love together, and very, very especially when there are little people who need/should be protected. They need legal protection, they need to have access to medical insurance through the big people in their lives, they need to be protected if something in their family goes awry.
So today, I am blogging in support of all families. No matter what they look like, just like my family, love holds them together ultimately. Go hug your family today. We all deserve it.
Like the World Needs Another Blog:
In our differences we have such commonality. Our true basic needs are all the same. Love and understanding. We strive for a full and productive life. We love and worry about our kids.
Today is LGBT Family Day. I write this blurb today to support all families and all mothers around our country who work hard everyday in their pursuit of Life Liberty and Happiness!!!
I met Chris and John while collaborating on a project with the company Chris and I work for about 12 years ago. Their son, Kendall, is adopted and has various serious health issues, like severe asthma; also, Kendall is a different race than his adopted parents. They are all the same gender. It tickles me that Kendall calls Chris “Daddy” and John “Pop-Pop”.
They are a happy, supportive family and the first that I’d met with same-sex parents. While I was delighted for them that they had adopted, there was a bit of a dark cloud over the adoption process that they went through back in 1995. Because they weren’t a “traditional” family, their priority was shunted to lowest. In order to receive a child, they were left to choose from children that had been passed over by everone else. With expensive health issues and being born of a drug-addicted mother, Kendall was not a easy choice. Chris and John wanted to be a family and looked past all the negatives with Kendall and just saw his beautiful smile. They chose him, and despite the hardships, are a family to look up to, full of love.
Uncle Roger’s Notebooks of Daily Life:
One of our [gay] neighbors, talking about what it means to adopt:
“Back when we were talking about this and freaking out about having a kid, I realized that it meant that we would have to give up some things in order to give someone a home who doesn’t have one. I can do that.”
. . . . I’d love to see more couples like my neighbors adopt kids out of foster care. The more children that have loving homes the better off we’ll be down the road.
LGBT families are great because they’re families. I’m fascinated by how families in all shapes and orders make themselves, how they get by. It’s so hard to be a family in this contemporary age—the first in the history of our species when all of society wasn’t oriented toward the institution of family. Raising children to survive another generation isn’t exactly automatic now and as a result cultural adaptations have to compensate for the gaps in what Hillary considered the village. Those adaptations make for a beautifully rich fabric of unique and diverse families. Today is a great occasion to celebrate your own adaptations, however and why ever you had to find them. Happy day, everyone!
As an anti-racist parent, all -isms concern me. The default person in our culture is white, straight, Christian and middle-class with a gender defined by context. (Curing a child’s fever? Female. Digging in the medicine cabinet, blindly searching for the right medication? Male.) The minute a person is outside of that default, he or she is at risk of being made a target.
The struggle of any anti-ism movement, as illustrated by the name discussion, are the -isms within that movement. Can we be antiracist when we’re adhering to classist values? Can we be antisexist if we’re heterosexist? How do we promote one group if to do so we have to step on another group? If we’re fighting for the greater good, does it matter that we have to leave some people behind?
I don’t have answers to these questions — I’m feeling it out as I go. But I remember within our activist feminist community that there was certainly a strong undercurrent of classism in our anti-racism. While we embraced Sweet Honey in the Rock and Alice Walker, we were far less likely to celebrate a real-life African American client with a bright red weave and airbrushed acrylic nails. I sense this same dichotomy in our discussions around names and hair.
I struggle with this as an activist, as a parent and as a transcultural adoptive parent. I struggle to recognize the limitations of my activism, my unpacked privilege, and my knee-jerk assumptions.
I don’t believe that a parenting relationship is inherently better than any other parenting relationship merely by virtue of the fact that there is a father and a mother present in the home. What matters far more is whether the parents are committed to the safety and wellbeing of their children. At a time when there is a severe lack of available foster homes, it is tragic to see couples rejected because they do not fit the traditionally accepted model. It is keeping those parents from providing love and care to children who desperately need it. It is keeping those children in situations that are harmful to them, because there are not enough safe places.
I read my friends’ blogs. I see the photographs of their children. I see how loved those children are, how well cared for. It matters not to those children whether their parents consist of a father and a mother, two mothers, two fathers, one father, one mother, two grandparents, or any other combination of parental figures. What matters to those children is that they know, deep down, that they are loved and wanted. That love transcends any boundaries of gender. Those children are blessed, as are their parents.
Most of my friends at the gym are Conservative. Many are Christian Conservatives. Don’t ask because even I don’t know how I do it. Some days, I can’t.
Friday, though, one friend really surprised me. Ellen is usually on t.v. there while we work out. One of my friends turned to me and said something like, “I love her. She’s awesome. I hated that her other show was cancelled. People were pissed off because she’s gay. It was funny. Who cares?”
No, that’s not a mind-blowing conversation. We didn’t uncover the mystery of life or anything of the sort. But I’m used to homeschool groups that send out a call to arms insisting people gather at the capitol in an effort to “save” marriage (because as our divorce rates show, we heterosexuals have done such a FABULOUS job). I’m used to reading the posts to those lists about how evil the school systems are for teaching tolerance. I’m used to reading calls for a boycott of Wal-Mart because they made one measely donation to a group that supports all families (a number of Christian groups initiated an influx of mail that made Wal-Mart vow never to do that again). True, the women at the gym aren’t part of that scene, still, I was surprised to hear such a comment.
Sometimes, people can see through the rhetoric. Sometimes, people can tune out the fear-mongers. Sometimes, we really can all get along. And sometimes, I have to smile quietly to myself.