LGBT Parenting Roundup

It’s time for another collection of news and fun stuff for LGBT parents:

• Put on your flak jackets. “It is same-sex parenting that is heating up as the next skirmish in the nation’s culture wars,” asserts the Chicago Tribune.
• Nancy Polikoff points out just how scary are the proposed Bush rules that would allow healthcare workers to refuse to participate in procedures on moral grounds. She says they would allow doctors and others to restrict assisted reproductive treatments to (heterosexually) married women. Pam has more, and notes that both the American Medical Association (AMA) and the American Hospital Association (AHA) oppose the regulations.
• Forbes has an article by the daughter of a single (non-lesbian) mom searching for her donor dad. Good article, although the lesbian mom she quotes who says “the only children she’s met with a passion to track down their donors are raised by just one parent,” seems to be a minority opinion. My sense is that there are many children of two moms who want to know their donor.
• Attorney Jeffrey Cleghorn talked with SoVo about legal planning for LGBT prospective parents.
• The Wisconsin State Journal weighs in against the Arkansas law that bans adoption by same-sex couples (and other unmarried individuals). Nothing profound for readers here, but good to see that the ban is causing people elsewhere to take notice.
• While much of the media coverage about LGBT families focuses on parents who create their families after coming out, Abigail Garner shares a letter from a daughter who is struggling with how to help her very closeted dad come out.
• Plans for an LGBT high school in Chicago are no more, but Bay Windows reports on the virtual GLBTQ Online High School that will launch in the fall of 2009. It promises to be a college-preparatory curriculum “using the best technology and techniques of distance education available. . . . It will also provide online social opportunities for students, and if there are clusters of students in specific areas, the school will help them get in contact.”
• Canadian-based OUT Adventures announced a series of trips dedicated to LGBT families with children more than six years old. Trips will operate in Thailand, Vietnam, India, China, South Africa, Spain and Italy with a maximum of 14 passengers per departure. I’m not at all familiar with this company, but a visit to an elephant conservation park in Thailand sure sounds fun.
• Gay pundit Andrew Sullivan points out a long New Yorker review of recent books that debunk “overparenting.” The author, Joan Acocella, asks whether it really is wrong to push our kids where they excel, discusses the role of feminism in the overparenting debate, and ponders, “whether the overparenting trend is truly the emergency that these authors say it is.”