LGBT Parenting Roundup

Court Cases

• The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today to uphold a lower-court ruling and demand the Louisiana Registrar of Vital Statistics respect a New York adoption by a same-sex couple of a Louisiana-born baby boy. Lambda Legal represented gay dads Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith in their quest to have Louisiana issue a new birth certificate identifying both of them as the boy’s parents, in part so Smith could add his son to his health insurance.
• Lambda Legal also argued in front of the the New York State Court of Appeals on behalf of a non-biological mother after a lower court denied her right to seek custody and visitation with, and provide financial support to the child she has parented with her former same-sex partner. (Yes, we’re still arguing this sort of thing in New York—a state that, marriage equality aside, is one of the most progressive in terms of LGBT rights. Sigh.)
• The Florida Department of Children & Families appealed the adoption of an infant relative by Vanessa Alenier, a lesbian from Hollywood, Florida. Last month a state circuit judge allowed the adoption, the third one that lower court judges have permitted to gay men and lesbians, despite state law banning them from adopting. Florida, unlike New York, has never had any pretense of being LGBT-friendly. (I’m talking government here, not Gay Days at Disney and Key West vacations.) Still, someday someone is going to wake up and realize that taking children away from loving, capable parents—and in many cases, the only parents they have ever known—is not in their best interests. Grrr. Read the rest of this post »

LGBT Parenting Roundup

Let us first take a moment to remember Lawrence King, the eighth grader who was shot and killed two years ago today by another student whom he asked to be his Valentine.

Politics and Law

• The Florida Department of Children and Families agreed to provide state Medicaid insurance, subsidized college tuition, and other benefits to the adopted son of gay Key West resident Wayne LaRue Smith. Smith became the first gay person to adopt in the state, after first fostering the boy and then being named his legal guardian. The DCF did not challenge the adoption, because it came after a legal guardianship, but because of the guardianship, they refused to provide the benefits normally given to children adopted from state care.
• Lesbian moms Angela Alfarache and Ivonne Cervantes are the featured couple in a New York Times story about marriage equality in Mexico City.

Schools and Youth

• The San Francisco school board voted in favor of $120,000 for instruction and services related to gay and lesbian issues. District staff must seek outside funding to cover the costs, but the measure guarantees at least a half-time position and other services, including the tracking of bullying based on sexual orientation.
• Change.org is running a petition asking Montgomery County Schools, near Washington, D.C., to stop allowing “ex-gay” organization Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays (PFOX) to distribute literature to high school students telling them that if they were LGBT or knew someone who identified as LGBT, they could change. (Much as I abhor the thought of such distribution, I wonder whether, from a legal perspective, they could ban PFOX but not PFLAG. Any lawyers want to weigh in? Could the PFOX material be proven fallacious or hateful, for example?)
• After a public hearing, the Tulsa County Union Public School District voted to keep the book Buster’s Sugartime on library shelves. The book is the print version of the television episode in which rabbit Buster visits a two-mom family at their maple sugar farm in Vermont. The episode caused an outcry a few years ago from President Bush’s Secretary of Education.

Personal Stories

• NPR’s StoryCorps has a wonderful, touching piece in which MJ Seide talks to her granddaughter Genna Alperin about falling in love with her partner, Genna’s other grandmother. Go listen, but have tissues handy.
• Haaretz.com has a good feature on gay and lesbian families in Israel, and in particular, their interactions with schools. (Thanks, Alex!)
• Thomas Beatie, who made headlines two years ago as the first pregnant transgender man many people had ever seen, is now pregnant with a third child for him and his wife Nancy.
• Chicago Now’s Lavender Menace column has a fun piece on “How to Throw a Lesbian Baby Shower“—during the Super Bowl.

Resources

• Trans Youth Family Allies has a very useful set of Frequently Asked Questions about gender variant and transgender youth.

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Even the Mulleted Deserve Equality

Sometimes, in our efforts to correct one instance of intolerance, we forget others.

Two weeks ago, a Miami-Dade judge declared Florida’s anti-gay adoption law unconstitutional and allowed Vanessa Alenier to adopt the one-year-old she and her partner Melanie Leon have been fostering.

The ultra-conservative Orlando’s Florida Family Policy Council (FPC) sent out an alert to its members last week, describing the ruling. It included a photo of a lesbian couple sporting mullets the likes of which I haven’t seen for many years. Neither woman is smiling, and I doubt most people would consider it a flattering photo.

The couple in the picture, however, is not Alenier and Leon. Orlando Sentinel writer Scott Maxwell rightly calls the Family Policy Council to task for this, and offers up a strong endorsement for allowing loving same-sex couples to adopt.

He calls the mulleted couple “abnormal-looking,” though, and says: “The couple look so odd (you literally can’t tell whether they are male or female) that one might wonder how any judge could place a young child with such a disturbing-looking duo.” Read the rest of this post »

Teen Sexuality: Hard Truths and Warm Love

I’m very pleased today to bring you a guest post by Lori Hahn, who has blogged at Hahn at Home for several years, and is now also a co-editor of the new GLBT blog Our Big Gayborhood.

Lori writes below of teen sexuality—an area in which I have no expertise as a parent. I’m grateful for hers.

I’ve marveled over the past few years as I grew my three beautiful, loving, delightful multi-racial adopted kids through their junior high years and then high school years, where one is gone and two are closing in on that mortarboard and tassel. Always knowing in my logical mind that sex and sexuality are part and parcel of parenting at this tumultuous age and there would be no denying it despite my desire at times curl into a fetal ball and wish it all away. Read the rest of this post »

In Memoriam: Brendan Burke

Last November, I posted about Brian Burke, the gruff president and general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, who very publicly supported his gay son Brendan, a hockey player for Miami University. Today I just learned of the sad news that Brendan was killed in a weather-related two-car accident in Indiana Friday afternoon.

My deepest condolences to Brendan’s family, who loved him unconditionally.

LGBT Parenting Roundup

Schools and Youth

• The Tennessee General Assembly’s House Education subcommittee referred to another subcommittee two bills that would ban the teaching of any sexuality other than heterosexuality. That means the bills’ fate is uncertain, although the head of the Tennessee Equality Project said he would have preferred a vote to defeat them.
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is getting all the headlines, but the Department of Defense is also reviewing a decision to give DOD teachers in same-sex relationships the same status and consideration as heterosexual married teachers when they request a job transfer together. The decision would also apply to opposite-sex couples in domestic partnerships.
• The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center is collaborating with Opportunities for Learning, a charter school with 34 locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties, to open a school where LGBTQ youth can learn in a harassment-free environment.
• Twenty-six members of Congress sent a letter to the Boy Scouts of America urging them to stop their anti-gay discrimination.

Law and Politics

• Nancy Polikoff reports on a custody case involving a former opposite-sex couple. The father was given custody by a lower court because the mother was now a lesbian. An appeals court overturned the ruling, and in the process overturned a 25-year-old ruling that had said the burden of proof was on a gay or lesbian parent to prove that the child would not be harmed by being exposed to their parent’s same-sex relationship.

Personal Stories

• The Advocate interviews Thomas Moore, husband to fellow transgender man Scott, who is not really the “second pregnant man” despite media reports stating so. Thomas discusses the prejudices and hurdles they’ve faced in finding a doctor, plus some universal issues of pregnancy and preparing for parenthood.

Lesbian Albatrosses Welcome Chick

The two female albatrosses in New Zealand who have been incubating an egg together are now the proud parents of a little chick.

The Times Online reports:

For the next six months the new parents will take turns to alternately guard and feed the chick, with one protecting it from predators while the other goes out to sea to forage for food several hundred kilometres away. They swap the roles every two days.

I bet none of us can top that division of labor.

Anyone else feel like sending stuffed plush albatross dolls to those who say same-sex parenting is unnatural?

(Photo credit: Mila Zinkova. Distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2. Not the actual albatrosses described above.)

Preview Review: A Family Is a Family Is a Family

Rosie O’Donnell’s new documentary A Family Is a Family Is a Family, premieres this Sunday, January 31, at 7 p.m. ET on HBO. I’ve seen a screener, and here are my thoughts.

Overall, this is a great film, aimed at the elementary school ages, that focuses on children of various backgrounds speaking about their families. There are children with same-sex parents, opposite-sex parents, single parents, parents of different races, adoptive parents, children living with grandparents, and more. It is a wide-ranging sampling of the great diversity of family life in our country. If there is one gap, it is that there are no children with transgender parents—or at least none that speak about having them. Read the rest of this post »

“She Got Me Pregnant”: Episode 97

Helen and I discuss our six-year-old’s letter to the president about health care reform. We also share our thoughts on LGBT families and California’s Proposition 8, Rosie O’Donnell’s upcoming show for kids, the impact of divorce on families, and a new list of LBGT-inclusive books from the American Library Association.

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

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.

Quote of the Week (Perhaps the Year)

“The only thing the State or anybody should be looking at, the best interests of the child and how he is loved.”

—Florida Judge Maria Sampedro-Iglesia, in granting Vanessa Alenier’s petition to adopt an infant cousin, despite the state ban on gay men and lesbians adopting children (via Nancy Polikoff)