I was focused on Blogging for LGBT Families Day all last week (and I encourage you to go read everyone’s wonderful posts, if you haven’t), but the world of LGBT parenting didn’t stop
going on around us. Here are some of the top stories from the past week.
Profiles
- The Windy City Times profiles adoptive gay dads Michael and Chris McGuire and their three-year-old daughter.
- Thirteen-year-old Jordan Pisey Windle is the youngest person ever to qualify for the U.S. Olympic diving trials. He also has two dads, and will serve as grand marshal of the Circle City Indiana Pride Parade, reports the Indianapolis Star.
- The journal Science profiles Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at MIT, recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, a self-described “out, queer person of color,” and the mother of a 4-year-old. (She also, like me, holds an undergraduate degree in astronomy from Wellesley College. (We overlapped by two years, but didn’t really know each other.) I point this out as a matter of alumnae pride—but also because it makes me feel like I’ve been underachieving.)
Perceptions
- J.C. Penney has followed up its terrific Mother’s Day catalog page featuring a two-mom family with an equally good one featuring two dads, despite despite coming under fire from right-wing group “One Million Moms” after selecting Ellen DeGeneres to be their spokesperson.
- The Washington Post’s Janice D’Arcy asks, “Has gay parenting ‘normalized’ the perception of gay relationships?” Great question—and one that came up in my newspaper column recently. I’ll post it here later this week.
Politics and Law
- The New Mexico Supreme Court has ruled that, as the National Center for Lesbian Rights reports, “a woman who raises a child with another woman and assumes parental and financial responsibility for the child can be a legal parent under New Mexico law, just as a male parent would be, regardless of whether she is a biological parent.”
- Two gay dads in Sydney, Australia have become the first same-sex couple in New South Wales to be the legal parents of a child conceived through surrogacy.
- Law professor Nancy Polikoff looks at the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a case involving survivor’s benefits for children created with the frozen sperm of their deceased biological father, and what it might mean for children of LGBT parents.
- A Georgia judge who in 2007 tried to remove a 7-year-old girl from the custody of her mother because the woman was a lesbian resigned after an ethics probe.
- Britain’s National Health Service has changed the language of a childbirth booklet to refer to “partner” rather than “dad.”
Pedagogy
- The Erie, Illinois School Board has banned Todd Parr’s The Family Book from its elementary school after parents complained about the one page on which it mentions that “some families have two moms or two dads.”
- The Davis County, Utah school district has removed Patricia Polacco’s In Our Mother’s House from the shelves and made it available only with parental permission because it features a two-mom family, and “State law says schools can’t have anything in the curriculum that advocates homosexuality,” according to a district spokesperson.
Penguins
- Following in the webbed footsteps of Tango’s parents, Silo and Roy, male Gentoo penguins Inca and Rayas of Madrid’s Faunia Park, who “have been inseparable for six years” have been given an egg to care for.
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