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Tag Archives: gay parents
Viral video calls for equal rights of gay parents
Director Mike Buonaiuto questions why same-sex parent families go unrecognised in Europe
05 NOVEMBER 2012 | BY ANDREW WHITTY
Today (5 November) sees the launch of a new campaign focusing on gay parenting rights throughout Europe.
The short film, entitled Invisible Parents, features the voice of a woman reminiscing about a happy childhood with her two fathers, before stating that the majority of Europe does not recognize families with gay parents.
The film is directed by Mike Buonaiuto, the man behind Homecoming, the video that went viral earlier this year. Invisible Parents launches to coincide with the UK’s National Adoption Week.
Michael Cashman, Member of European Parliament, is fully supporting the campaign.
He said: ‘Gay and lesbian parents can often find themselves legally invisible in a large percentage of the continent, putting their entire family in a very vulnerable situation especially with regard to healthcare, holidays or family legal systems.
http://youtu.be/aeBy_q4i40s
Gay Parents Are Great as Parenting
New Study: Gay Parents = Great Kids
Let’s see, so far, California’s Proposition 8 banning gay marriage has been found to be unconstitutional, unnecessary (or did we miss the collapse of traditional marriage in Massachusetts, Connecticut or the four other jurisdictions in which same-sex marriage is legal?) and just plain bad for the wedding reception industry. Now comes word, courtesy of the journal Family Process, that it’s also bad for kids.A new study by family therapist Arlene Istar Lev shows that children of gay and lesbian individuals and couples are actually better adjusted and have fewer social problems than peers raised by heterosexuals. Before Prop 8–lovers charge reverse bias, there’s a simple explanation for the phenomenon: gay and lesbian parents feel pressure to try harder, lest any shortcomings in their kids be taken as a sign of their inadequacy as parents.Paradoxically, it may even be harder for the kids of non-straight parents to come out as gay or lesbian themselves. Why? “There is an assumption that the optimal outcome is to produce heterosexual children,” Lev says. “Gay parents may struggle with having gay or transgender children…because of the societal pressure they feel to raise ‘normal’ children.” One more reason for the culture warriors to tend their own gardens and let other parents — gay or straight — tend theirs.Read more: Time, Healthland
The Social Value of Gay Marriage
The standard pseudo-religious argument against same-sex marriage is that “conventional” marriage between a man and a woman offers value to society that same sex marriage does not. Quite the most impressive counter to that argument, written by a straight woman, is “Why Gay Marriage is Good For Everyone” which I found at “Casaubon’s Book “on Science Blogs.
In Wisconsin last week, a court ruled that a lesbian mother who had been a stay-at-home mom to raise two adopted children with her partner, had no status as parent because only the other mother could be recognised in law as an adoptive parent. (“In Wisconsin, Not All Parents Are Equal“). It is to find ways around complicated legal difficulties such as these that so many queer families are forced into complex, sometimes imaginative, legal solutions of their own.
When Henry was 69, he legally adopted Bob, who was 70. It gave them legal protections, offered an advantageous inheritance tax rate and made the pair into a family.
My youngest sister, Vicky, is 7 years younger than I am, and because my parents divorced when she was an infant, she remembers no time in her life when Sue, my step-mother didn’t stand in a parental relationship to her. Within a day or two of my turning 18, my mother sat me down to tell me that she was changing legal documents to leave her share of Vicky’s guardianship to me if my mother died.
In premodern Europe, marriage usually began as a property arrangement, was in its middle mostly about raising children, and ended about love. Few couples in fact married ‘for love,’ but many grew to love each other in time as they jointly managed their household, reared their offspring, and shared life’s experiences. Nearly all surviving epitaphs to spouses evince profound affection. By contrast, in most of the modern West, marriage begins about love, in its middle is still mostly about raising children (if there are children), and ends – often – about property, by which point love is absent or a distant memory. (Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europexxi-xxii)
There are two generations of divorce in our family to model on – two generations of failed marriages and steps and sundered relationships. And yet my sisters and I are all stably and happily married after some early romantic errors. Eric and I have been married for almost 12 years, my sisters for six and five years respectively, and they look good to last. The single best and most lasting partnership in our immediate family is my mother and step-mother’s, 31 years and counting. It is on this all three of us base our (heterosexual) partnerships, and the model is sturdy and set to last a lifetime (technically Eric and I have the deal that after 75 years of marriage, we can discuss dating other people – he’ll be 103 and I’ll be 101 and we figured by then we might need a change ;-)). In our case, at least, these three traditional, heterosexual, nuclear family models rest firmly on a foundation created by gay marriage. It is a sturdy place to rest.
by an untraditional one. Children are not necessarily better off, or better prepared for their own marriages, when raised by opposite sex parents, or by same sex parents: the test is that they are raised by parents who have understood and successfully negotiated the challenges of living lives in committed partnership. Some of these will be opposite sex couples in conventional marriage (as my own parents were), some will be same sex couples in unrecognised, but equally committed partnerships – as Casaubon’s were before the law changed.
It was the first legal day of weddings in the state of Massachusetts, and the day before, as the news was filled of stories of weddings, my phone rang off the hook. Friends, neighbors, exes – everyone who knew me or had known me wanted to know one thing “were they going to do it?” Everyone I knew was delighted in absentia that my mothers would get to marry. Even people I knew who were ambivalent about gay marriage, or even personally opposed to it in general called me to congratulate me and ask me to extend my congratulations to them.
Here, I think, the salutary example of gay marriage may actually be helpful – by forcing the conversation to focus on the rights and legal protections of marriage, on the ways that marriage is fundamentally an economic and family institution – not to the exclusion of love, as we sometimes postulate it, but as part of love – as the expression in mutual support and dependence of the material realities of what love actually is when lived – they begin to present marriage as an attainable and achievable accomplishment. If love is not just a feeling, but a state in which you preserve and protect one another, merging strengths and assets for the benefit of partners and any children, and for the support of one another and extended family, this is something that might be achievable, rather than a diffuse idea of unending bliss and constant happiness.
Queer Families' Challenge for Catholic Church.
Catholic Church Must Learn to Deal With Children of Gay Parents.
One lesbian mom’s experience of acceptance by a Catholic school
We didn’t want that reality just sprung on him, a thoughtful and decent man who, we expected, might get an earful from a few parishioners in the ensuing days and weeks. We asked if our coming to church like that was OK with him. Our priest said he appreciated the heads-up. “Just come, just come,” he insisted, expressing considerable relief that we had nothing else to discuss (“When I saw your names in my appointment book, I was afraid you might be asking me to bless your union”). He then inquired as to the boys’ names and ages and, hearing that the eldest would be almost six, asked, “Will you send him here, then, for school?” My partner and I shot a glance at each other. We said we hadn’t figured that was a possibility. We’d been struggling with the school question a bit. Sending the kids to the village public school in the very rural district where we lived was out of the question. We wanted a more demanding education for them. Sending them to our parish school in the small city in which we worked was, we had thought, equally out of the question. The priest raised both eyebrows. “No, not out of the question. Not at all. Send them here. In fact, I don’t even think you’d be the first same-sex couple to do so.” We’d had no idea. He thought a bit, came up with the family’s name, and said he thought all three of the girls were still enrolled and doing fine.
The Challenge:
Earlier posts:
Boulder School Exclusion: Other Parents’ Reactions
Boulder Parents: “They told Us in School To Love Everyone”
Lesbian Parents, Boulder Catholic School (3)
Lesbian Mums, Catholic Schools: The Voice of Experience
Books:
Garner, Abigail: Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is
Newman, Leslea: Heather Has Two Mommies: 10th Anniversary Edition (Alyson Wonderland)