First, congratulations to lesbian mom Annise Parker, who won election as mayor of Houston, Texas, the country’s fourth largest city. She is the first openly gay or lesbian mayor of any of the country’s 10 largest cities.
Schools and Youth
- The Oklahoma City School District voted to amend the district’s bullying and harassment policy to include protections for LGBT students.
- U.K. Schools Minister Vernon Coaker announced that starting next September, schools will be required to record all incidents of homophobic, racist and sexist bullying, in order to promote faster responses as well as trend tracking.
- The Alameda, California school board decided to keep an elementary school curriculum aimed at preventing anti-LGBT bullying among elementary school kids until a broader anti-bullying program is developed. While this is being reported in some places as a loss for LGBT rights advocates, who wanted the board to adopt “Lesson 9,” an anti-bullying program more specifically focused on anti-LGBT bullying, I’m going to reserve judgment until I see what the broader curriculum contains. In many ways, I feel a broad program that shows the effects of bullying in all its many guises will be not only more acceptable to all parents, but more effective with children as well. The danger, however, is that the new curriculum will be so broad or touch so lightly on LGBT issues that it won’t be as effective in preventing anti-LGBT bullying as a more focused program. Stay tuned.
- The 2009 Momentum Report on the progress of LGBT rights during the past decade found that between 2000 and 2009, the number of states that had a safe school law that specifically cited sexual orientation and gender identity/expression for protection rose from one to 13. The number of Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs in high schools rose from 700 to 4,700. At the same time, the percentage of LGBT students who reported hearing homophobic remarks in school has remained above 99 percent. LGBT students who reported being harassed in school rose from 83.2 percent to 86.2 percent. (More on the report below.)
Politics and Law
- The Oregon Supreme Court let stand an appeals court decision declaring that a woman who consents to her partner’s insemination is also a parent of the resulting child. The court drew parallels with the husband of a woman who conceives through donor insemination. This means that in Oregon, Nancy Polikoff tells, us, that “All lesbian couples who have a child using donor insemination are now both the legal parents of the child.” She notes, however, that nonbiological mothers should still get a court order (of parentage or adoption) to ensure recognition by other states.
- The 2009 Momemtum Report has also found that the majority of LGB people live in states with either full (42%) or at least partial (22%) second-parent or joint adoption laws. The bad news is that about 17% still lives in a state with ambiguous second-parent or joint adoption laws, and another 19% lives in states that effectively ban same-sex second-parent or joint adoptions. The entire report is well worth reading in full. It even covers topics not often looked at elsewhere, like the amount of money being given to LGBT causes.
- Lawyer and lesbian mom Lisa A. Linsky writes about the decision by the New York State Senate to reject a marriage equality bill, and asks, “What do I tell my daughter about these injustices and now, the actions of the 38 New York State Senators who had no compunction relegating me and my family to something less than other families?”
- The Irish Supreme Court ruled that a man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple was the child’s legal father and should have visitation rights to their three-year-old son. The ruling was based in part on the fact that Ireland’s constitution doesn’t recognize the lesbians as a valid family unit.
Personal Stories
- As part of the New York Times “One in 8 Million” series, fourteen-year-old Joshua Caouette talks about moving away from his mother to live with his father and his father’s partner. (Thanks, Towleroad.)