School Issues
- The New York Times reports on parents who are objecting to inclusion of same-sex families, gay people in history, and other LGBT content in school curricula.
- If you read the above, you should also read the great piece in the Advocate by Stuart Biegel, a member of the education and law faculty at UCLA, about concerns over LGBT-inclusive content in school curricula.
Family Profiles
- ABC News profiles the Berman-Cotlar family of Boulder, Colorado, which consists of two moms, a pair of twins, their involved gay dad, and a stepsister. (Article and video.)
- Laura Douglas-Brown writes in the Georgia Voice about how people with LGBT parents—even if they are not LGBT themselves—should be included under the umbrella of the LGBT community. “Our community has embraced these children as our own,” she writes, “But what happens when these kids grow up? . . . How sadly ironic it will be if we who were often kicked out of our communities of birth because of our sexual orientation then turn around and do that to another generation of kids.” Hear, hear.
- An Australian lesbian couple has had quintuplets—without the use of fertility drugs, an occurrence with 60 million to one odds. Among other lesbian families who had lots of kids at once are two Orange County, California moms who had quadruplets in 2008, and already had a two-year-old son, and the two moms profiled on the Discovery Health channel the same year, each of whom had nearly simultaneous twins. Each couple in all three cases already had one previous child.
Politics and Law
- The Washington state Senate heard testimony on a bill that would allow paid surrogates in the state.
- The White House held a big conference on bullying. I covered it over at Keen News Service.
- LGBT advocates in Illinois are questioning the state funding of three faith-based foster care agencies that have policies denying licenses to openly gay and lesbian parents.
Research
- A new study from the Pew Research Center has found that Americans are more accepting of same-sex parents than of single mothers. The study did not consider single lesbian parents or single fathers of any orientation. Sigh. Can’t we judge people on the quality of their parenting rather than the structure of their families? While I personally am grateful to be parenting with a partner, I’d rather be a single parent than force myself to be with a partner who wasn’t a good fit. And I’ll refer readers once again to Louise Sloan’s book, Knock Yourself Up: No Man? No Problem: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom, perhaps the only parenting book by an out lesbian mom that is directed at a mixed audience, lesbian and not. (Though of course single motherhood happens both by choice and by unintentional circumstance.)
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