It’s time to round up some of the stories I haven’t covered here already. There’s lots going on, so have a read while you’re in between holiday preparations.
- The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services has updated its policy so that both same-sex spouses will be put on their children’s birth certificates.
- But the Wisconsin state Court of Appeals has ruled that a married lesbian couple cannot put both their names on their child’s birth certificate, despite the fact that married different-sex couples can do so. The court said the couple improperly presented their case as an adoption petition in order to avoid filing fees and the requirement to notify the then-attorney general, who was known to be anti-gay. One of the plaintiffs, in a e-mail to family and friends that she shared with me, explained that they only brought their case as an adoption action because there was no other category into which it fit, “since it is a right that is automatically granted to opposite-sex married couples without them having to file any forms in court.” A federal case in Wisconsin on the matter (with different plaintiffs) is still pending.
- The indefatigable folks at the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review a case in which the state of Alabama refuses to recognize second-parent adoptions done in Georgia. NCLR tells us, “Before this ruling, no state supreme court in the country had refused to recognize a same-sex parent’s adoption from another state—or any out-of-state adoption—based on a disagreement with how the court issuing the adoption interpreted its own adoption laws.” They are basing their case on the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.
- The Citizen-Times looks at the progress of adoption rights for same-sex couples in North Carolina.
- A Utah judge reversed his order that a lesbian couple give up the child they had been fostering. He had initially said that children do better with different-sex parents and ordered the child removed from their care. Several days later, he then recused himself from the case. Nathaniel Frank, director of the What We Know Project at Columbia Law School (which compiled the aforementioned reams of evidence), had a few words to say about all this.
- And in other good news from Utah, Jackie Biskupski became the state’s first openly LGBTQ mayor after she was elected to lead Salt Lake City. She’s not only an out politician—she’s also a lesbian mom.
- The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that nonbiological parents who were in same-sex relationships and broke up before same-sex couples could marry, may nevertheless have custodial rights to their children.
- Kansas lawmakers recently debated whether same-sex couples should be allowed to be foster parents. They heard both from Clinton Anderson, director of the American Psychological Association’s LGBT Concerns Office, and Rev. Donald Paul Sullins, a professor at the Catholic University of America. Anderson argued the APA’s LGBT-supportive view; Sullins, however, ignoring reams of evidence to the contrary, argued that “even problematic opposite-sex couples provide a better environment for children than same-sex couples,” reports the Topeka Capitol-Journal.
- Elementary school parents in Rockford, Michigan, were notified that the latest volume of the Captain Underpants series, Captain Underpants and the Sensational Saga of Sir Stinks-a-Lot, contains a panel showing that one of the main characters (gasp!) comes out as gay later in life. Scatological humor, however, apparently needs no warning.
- Finally, in international news, Portugal’s parliament has approved laws allowing same-sex couples to adopt and lesbians to access fertility services.