Family stories:
- SoVo talks with a lesbian and a gay man who each have lesbian moms. It’s a rare look at these “second gen-ers” who are sometimes forgotten in our haste to insist that not all LGBT parents have LGBT kids.
- On a related note, Brett Berk (who guest posted here last week) discusses how his newly out mom is trying to “out-gay” him.
- Autumn Sandeen writes about how being a transgender parent affects her feelings on Mother’s Day, and how she was reminded this year about the meaning of family.
- Paige Schilt (who also guest posted here last week) interviews her spouse Katy Koonce about being a trans-genderqueer-butch-dyke-mommy.
Politics (on parental issues; general politics I cover in my Friday roundups):
- The Australian government confirmed that same-sex parents will be eligible for its paid parental leave, which will allow primary carers up to eighteen weeks of leave after the birth of a child. The City of Sydney Council is also looking at ways of offering parental leave to adoptive and non-biological co-parents.
- The Louisiana House Health and Welfare Committee voted in favor of a bill that would bar the state from issuing birth certificates showing two people of the same sex as parents. It now goes to the full House. The measure stems from a federal lawsuit brought by a gay couple who want the state to reissue the birth certificate of their son, whom they adopted in New York.
- Live in Arkansas? Want to know which of your neighbors signed the petition in favor of banning lesbian and gay people from adopting children? KnowThyNeighbor.org has posted the names of those who did so. (Thanks, 365gay.com.)
- The California Supreme Court upheld a lower-court ruling that said a private religious high school wasn’t covered by state civil rights law and could expel students it believed were lesbians.
- A California congressman is sponsoring a bill to prohibit political campaigns from using children in TV commercials and other campaign materials. He is doing so in response to a “Yes on 8” campaign ad that featured several children attending the wedding of their lesbian teacher. A parent of one of the children was outraged that her daughter’s image was used by the campaign. (IMHO, I think it’s fine to restrict campaigns from using images of children without their consent or their parent’s, but the whole issue gets muddier when the children are expressing their own opinions in support of the campaign that the ad represents. See, for example, this new one from Equality California.)
Resources:
- The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Family Equality Council, and COLAGE have launched All in God’s Family: Creating Allies for Our LGBT Families, a new curriculum for welcoming congregations.
- Jefferson County Library in Louisiana—not often seen as the most progressive of states; see above—will be displaying Marcus Ewert’s book 10,000 Dresses
, which features a transgender protagonist, on display all month. (See my interview with Ewert here.)
Entertainment:
- ABC has picked up 13 episodes of the new sitcom “Modern Family” for the fall. The show follows the lives of three families: a traditional nuclear family, a gay couple with a newly adopted Vietnamese child, and an older man who has just married a younger Latina wife.