Politics and Law
Two big wins this past week:
- Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to adopt each other’s children.
- Uruguay’s lower house of Congress approved a bill to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The Senate must vote before September 15, and is also expected to approve. Uruguay approved same-sex civil unions last year.
And various ups and downs:
- Florida’s Third District Court of Appeals heard arguments to determine if they will uphold a trial court ruling that would allow same-sex couples to adopt in the state.
- Premier Anna Bligh of Queensland, Australia announced “altruistic surrogacy” would be legal by the end of the year for all Queenslanders. Altruistic surrogacy is when a woman agrees, for no financial gain, to become pregnant and bear a child for another person or persons. The right is having the usual conniptions about how this will encourage same-sex parenting.
- In Tasmania, Australia, legislation to end discrimination against same-sex couples passed the House of Assembly. The Legislative Council will debate the Bill this week.
- Although New Zealand’s Acting Family Court head Judge Paul Von Dadelzsen called for same-sex couples to be allowed to adopt, Prime Minister John Key says he doesn’t see the need for a rush, with less than one hundred adoptions a year in New Zealand overall.
- The News & Observer in North Carolina reports on the “discreet and little-known practice” of same-sex couples asking judges to grant them second-parent adoptions.
- An Orthodox rabbi in Israel has come up with a way for gay Jewish men to have children but also stay within Jewish religious law. The man would marry a woman who knew the union was solely to produce children. The man would continue in a celibate relationship with his male partner, and must receive counseling about his sexuality from religious psychologists. Not exactly a progressive solution, and a far cry from the acceptance in many reform Jewish congregations, but as Pinknews.co.uk notes, it is still one of the first acknowledgments by the Orthodox establishment that homosexuality exists in Israel, and a far cry from the religious right in the U.S., which wants to keep gay people as far away from children as possible.
- HRC says they now have 40 adoption agencies participating in their All Children — All Families initiative, “committed to implementing policies and practices that welcome, affirm and support LGBT foster and adoptive parents.”
- While it’s an older post, I don’t remember noting it before: David Badash observes that the states with marriage equality (and similarly good rights for same-sex parents) have the lowest rates of child homelessness. Most of the states that have banned adoption by single gay men or lesbians or same-sex couples? Not so good. Badash also says that by some estimates, 40 percent of homeless youth are LGBTQ.
Schools and Youth
- After the New York ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of a 14-year-old student who was constantly harassed by students at his high school for being gay, a school district in Herkimer County, N.Y. agreed to take immediate action to protect him. The NYACLU says their case will proceed until the school addresses the systemic problems that allowed the harassment to continue.
- Sixteen-year-old Kyle Giard-Chase, a transgender student in Vermont, is leading the effort in his state to require the state’s middle and high schools to offer the option of genderless bathrooms.
- The Bristol, England-based Educational Action Challenging Homophobia (EACH) organization has received a cash award of £391,668 from the Big Lottery Fund, and will be launching a number of initiatives to help gay youth and create safe schools.
- Oklahoma County District Judge Barbara Swinton ruled that high school teacher Joe Quigley was wrongfully terminated. Quigley’s attorneys had argued that his advocacy for LGBT students had made him a target for the administration.
Personal Stories
- The Gazette in Quebec talks about changes in the province’s gay community, in particular, the increasing number of parents and children.
Entertainment
- Paige Schilt at Bilerico brings us an interview with Jake Gonzales, Program Director of the Annual Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, which sponsored “Saturday Morning Cartoons” for kids this year. The films included Dottie’s Magic Pockets (see my interview with creator Tammy Stoner), and BuddyG: My Two Moms and Me (which I’ve written about here). Clips of both Dottie and BuddyG are here. It’s great to see kids’ films with LGBT families getting wider exposure; I hope this means we’ll see more of them being produced.
And in the “not exactly what we were looking for” category this week comes the news that scientists in Oregon have created four healthy monkey babies by replacing most of the genes of one rhesus macaque monkey with genes from another. The Advocate’s headline, “Two Female Monkeys Make Four Babies” is deceptive, however; the egg still had to be fertilized with sperm. The experiment was not intended to create a lesbian utopia, in any case, but was rather an attempt to help prevent genetic deformities.