LGBT Parenting Roundup

• LGBTQ Parenting Roundup, Politics and Law, Raising • kevin jennings, maine, mississippi, ref 1

Just Awesome

  • The Harry Potter Alliance, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit “dedicated to bringing the themes of Harry Potter into the real world” announced a grassroots effort to help defeat Ref. 1 and support marriage equality in Maine. As Jeremy at Good As You said, Dumbledore would be proud.

Youth and Schools

  • Fifty-three Republicans have signed a letter calling on President Obama to fire Kevin Jennings, the Assistant Deputy Secretary for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools at the Department of Education. Jennings is under fire for an incident that happened over 20 years ago in Massachusetts, when he advised a student to use a condom when the teen said he was sleeping with an older man. The right is framing it as unreported child abuse, and claiming the teen was only 15, although Media Matters has posted an image of the student’s current driver’s license, showing he was 16 at the time, over the age of consent in the state.
  • Rev. Irene Monroe wonders why the National Equality March did not have more support from the Black Church. “More than 42 percent of the country’s homeless youth identify as LGBT,” she says, “and approximately 90 percent of that group are of color. . . . Before another one of our children is put on the streets because she or he is lesbian or gay, I ask the faithful in our community to reevaluate the harm we create by interpreting biblical passages with prejudice. We would not be here, today if our forbearers did not make the same choice, and our children deserve the same show of strength and love.”
  • A Mississippi school is under pressure from the ACLU after they said a photo of 17-year-old Ceara Sturgis wearing a tux could not appear in the yearbook. Sturgis is a lesbian who prefers to wear masculine clothing. Kudos to her mother, Veronica Rodriguez, who told reporters, “She’s not a troublemaker. She is gay. She wants to wear the tuxedo because that’s who she is. She’s not ashamed of that.”
  • Edward Byrne has a great piece about traveling to the National Equality March with a group of high-school students from Massachusetts.

Politics and Law

  • The South Carolina Court of Appeals left a two-year-old child in the custody of Erin S., a lesbian who had been approved as the child’s pre-adoptive foster parent. The child’s former foster parents, who had declined to adopt him, changed their mind when they heard he was being placed with a lesbian.
  • Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, appeared on Pat Robertson’s The 700 Club and complained that the federal government is forcing the church to allow gay people to adopt children, which is “against nature.” (Bonus points to any reader who leaves a comment with an example of a non-traditional family from the Bible.)

Parenting Advice

Personal Stories

  • Paige Schilt at Bilerico writes about the difficulties of going from “a packed house of head-banging lezzies” to getting one’s son to kindergarten the next day.
  • Mother Bonnita Spikes writes about the touching story of how a tragic hate crime helped her better understand and accept her transgender daughter. (Thanks, Genia.)

Entertainment

  • Former Grey’s Anatomy star T. R. Knight told Ellen DeGeneres that he’d like a baby. I’m sure she and Portia would send him a great baby present.
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