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.