Judith Warner wrote a spot-on column in the New York Times about the impact of California’s Prop 8 on several LGBT families she knows. About two gay dads, she says:
They’d also had to go to parent conferences and tell the teachers that their five-year-old daughter, Liza, might be struggling in school because she was scared that her family might fall apart. . . .
“They can’t take [your marriage] away, right?” she’d asked her parents. “They can’t take yours away when you have children, can they?”
“That’s when we realized she was afraid something would happen to us,” Swanson told me by phone on Wednesday. “We said, ‘They can’t take us away from you. We will be here for you forever.’”
“It’s difficult to explain to a five-year-old why it is people don’t want your parents to be married,” he continued. “They’re young enough that there was a chance they could have grown up thinking all their lives that their family was equal and accepted. Now they’re not going to have that chance. They’ll have to spend at least part of their lives knowing that their family is something that people don’t feel is acceptable.”
Best. Interests. Of. The. Children.
In another story, a lesbian mom in Fresno says a priest from her diocese made her resign from her position as president of the parent-teacher association at her son’s Catholic school after she went to a No On Prop 8 vigil last Thursday.
Information on tomorrow’s national protests against Prop 8 is here. Whether you protest in a group or simply by talking with your neighbors, may these stories infuriate and motivate you.