Marriage Is Not the Answer

Slate’s Emily Yoffe this week opined that “out-of-wedlock births are a national catastrophe” and marriage is the solution to childhood poverty and economic growth. Lauren Bruce at Offsprung has already taken her to task for her assertions, and notes that gay families are out of luck in Yoffe’s scenario. I’d like to add a bit more to Lauren’s wise words.

Yoffe is, as I understand, in favor of marriage for same-sex couples. Given her position on single mothers, however, it seems that her support for marriage equality may be largely engendered by her view of marriage as the answer for society’s ills. The millions of children raised successfully by LGBT parents, however, without, in most cases, the benefits of marriage (or even “marriage-like” institutions, such as civil unions or domestic partnerships), show that marriage is not in itself necessary to raising well-adjusted children. Read the rest of this post »

La Leche Leaves Out Lesbians

I’m all for breastfeeding. My partner breastfed our son. While its health benefits may still be argued by some, I take the general approach that natural is usually best. At the same time, I fiercely defend a woman’s right to make the decision about whether to breastfeed and for how long. The question has too many variables for there to be a single answer that works for all mothers. (See, for example, the story of Alex Elliot, whose breast-reduction surgery made it impossible to breastfeed.)

The Chicago Sun-Times recently questioned whether the breastfeeding advocacy group La Leche League goes too far in pressuring women to breastfeed. I’ll leave that an open question; I think much depends on the specific local La Leche group. What was more eyebrow-raising to me, however, was the article’s note that one of La Leche League’s 10 basic principles is:

Breastfeeding is enhanced and the nursing couple sustained by the loving support, help, and companionship of the baby’s father. A father’s unique relationship with his baby is an important element in the child’s development from early infancy.

This may be true for partnered, straight women, but leaves no room for the experiences of either partnered lesbians or single moms of any orientation. I haven’t had any direct experience with La Leche myself, so I thought I’d ask you, dear readers: Have you used the services of a local La Leche group, or are you a La Leche Leader yourself? Have they been supportive of you and other non-traditional families? If so, is there an opportunity to ask the organization to reword their principle to fit their clientèle? If not, is breastfeeding support and information yet another area where lesbians and single moms are left without equal resources? What’s been your experience?

ESPN Tackles Sexual Orientation Bias

ESPN’s Outside the Lines show this Sunday tackles the topic of negative recruiting and perceived sexual orientation. My son is far from college age, and I have no idea if he’ll turn out to be an athlete, but I have to wonder how the fact of his two moms would play in a recruiter’s mind. More immediately, sexual orientation (and gender identity) bias is a problem for young people today, and it bothers me as a mother, a lesbian, and a former NCAA athlete (albeit at a non-scholarship school).

The National Center for Lesbian Rights has been working with Outside the Lines to shed light on this topic:

In October 2006, NCLR co-hosted an LGBT Sports Think Tank with the NCAA designed to examine ways to address negative recruiting and sexual orientation. Following the success of our Think Tank, NCLR along with Pat Griffin, the Director of the “It Takes a Team!” Educational Campaign for LGBT Issues in Sport, began calling for a national dialogue concerning the impact of negative recruiting based on perceived sexual orientation. Recently, we’ve worked closely with the producer of Outside the Lines on the difficult task of convincing coaches and athletes to break the silence around this harmful practice. . . .

The program will air on ESPN on Sunday, March 23 at 9:30 a.m. EST, and will re-air at 12:00 p.m. EST on ESPNEWS. Reporter Julie Foudy will discuss the topic of negative recruiting and perceived sexual orientation with several special guests.

Yes, that’s 9:30 a.m. No interference with the season finale of The L Word in the evening.

Weekly Political Update

• A new advocacy group, tentatively named the LGBT Foreign Policy Project, is asking the U.S. State Department for greater action and involvement in addressing the LGBT-rights issues mentioned in the department’s annual report.
• AIDS counselor Jason Hair-Wynn recently applied for a new passport so he could go to Africa and use his expertise. The U.S. State Department, however, refused to recognize his new hyphenated name because he is a gay man married to another man. They claimed they were prevented from doing so by the Defense of Marriage Act.
• The Connecticut legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony from civil-union couples reporting discrimination despite the supposed equivalence of civil unions and marriage. One civil-unioned lesbian couple said that even though they checked ahead with the hospital before the birth of their son, the staff couldn’t find the right birth certificate for a child with civil-unioned parents. A state social worker also “insisted Lois was a single mother, and tried to give her a state-mandated ’single mom’ talk. The couple eventually got the paperwork, faxed from a friend.” Yes, new moms love to run around after paperwork when they should be spending time with their children. Read the rest of this post »

My Life In Six Words

I’ve been tagged by the talented Harlyn Aizley, who blogs at Are You My Mothers, to write a memoir of my life in six words or fewer, mention my tagger, and then tag five others. Let’s see:

Not what I expected.

A somewhat wordier recap: astronomy student, medieval historian, dotcom boomster, marketing executive at a major financial-services firm, mother, freelance writer. Couldn’t have predicted any of those stages when I started the previous one. A random walk indeed, but I’ve had good company along the way.

I’ll tag:

• Allyson of Crossing the T
• Cait and/or Jen of Addition Problems
• Shannon of Peter’s Cross Station
• Terrance of The Republic of T
• Vikki of Up Popped a Fox

I’ll also ask readers without blogs to play along in the comments here.

When you’re done, you can go read Harlyn’s recent article, “Color Me Gay,” at Beacon Broadside.

Bi-Partisan Hypocrisy

From New York magazine’s March 24 article on Eliot Spitzer:

One local $1,000 girl known for a thoroughgoing reading of the Times op-ed page said she knew right away it was a Democratic sex scandal, “because if it was a Republican the hookers would have been guys.”

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 20

This week, Helen and I show you why parenting is as much fun as a barrel of monkeys, literally. We congratulate a pair of lesbian moms for their prodigious fallopian feats, commend Kenneth Cole for recognizing lesbian moms, and turn a parent’s eye to the last two episodes of The L Word. (Imagine Bette trying to assemble a porta-crib in her tent.)

(Yes, a couple of stories overlap for regular Mombian readers, but we thought we’d entertain the viewers at After Ellen with some of the news. Also, the aforementioned cold plaguing our household sapped our creativity a bit this week. We’ll bring sparkling fresh stuff to next week’s vlog.)

Online Videos by Veoh.com

If the Veoh video above isn’t working (sometimes their server can be flaky), you can try it at Daily Motion.

(Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.)

“America’s Favorite Mom” Wants LGBT Nominees

Last week, I urged readers to nominate their favorite LGBT moms for the title of “America’s Favorite Mom” in Teleflora’s Mother’s Day contest. I thought it would be a good opportunity for visibility.

Two days after my post, I received an e-mail from a publicist at Edelman, Teleflora’s PR agency. She thanked me for helping them to raise awareness about the program within the LGBT community. She then asked if I’d like to be kept apprised of any LGBT submissions to the contest, so I could urge readers to vote for them. I said yes.

In re-reading the contest rules, however, I noticed that each person can only submit the name of one nominee. Clearly, the organizers didn’t realize this would force children of partnered LGBT moms to choose between them (and could lead to shameless bribery on the part of said parents). I wrote back to inquire whether there might be an exception made here. Read the rest of this post »

Cold Spell

We’ve been beset with colds here at the House of Mombian, thanks to the petri dish that is our son’s preschool class. Whenever he comes home with a sniffle, I start popping the vitamin C in the vain hope it will slow the oncoming train bearing down on my sinuses.

Enough strained metaphors; it’s time for this week’s poll:

Survival of the Tolerant

“Gay” is the number-one insult among schoolchildren, reports the BBC, although most use it to mean “lame,” without any intended reference to sexual orientation. The article charts how the meaning of the word has changed over the years (remember when it used to mean “happy” or “festive”?), and notes “This mutation of the word is one reason why using ‘gay’ as in a pejorative sense often goes unchallenged.” Still, they say, it does get used to insult those who are gay or perceived to be. A good article on why anti-bullying measures in schools must still discourage use of the term in a pejorative sense, and an interesting read for language geeks as well. (Thanks to Box Turtle Bulletin for the link.)

Box Turtle Bulletin also reports this morning on a bill just passed by the Arizona House, “designed to ensure students expressing their religious beliefs are treated the same as those taking more secular positions.” I’m all for religious freedom, but the bill’s author, Rep. Doug Clark (R-Anthem) is specific about what this might mean: Read the rest of this post »