Here’s what’s been going on in the past week or so while we (or at least I) have had our NCAA women’s basketball brackets totally upset:
- Kevin Drum writes at Mother Jones about “How Gays Won the Adoption Battle.” (Personally, I think we’re still in the process of winning—but Drum rightly explores why same-sex couples have been able to secure adoption rights in more places than they have marriage rights.)
- The Advocate’s Abby Dorsey has a lengthy piece on “The New Lesbian Dad: How some women are reinventing what it means to be a parent.”
- Susan Olsen, who played Cindy Brady on The Brady Bunch, wrote of her close relationship to her screen dad, Robert Reed, who was gay but closeted. He is one of the reasons Olsen supports marriage equality. She said, “This tempetuous actor who bottle fed puppies when he wasn’t quarreling with the heads of networks shaped my heart as much as my biological parents did. So I really can honestly say, ‘My dad was gay.'”
- Washington State Senator Kevin Ranker (D-Orcas Island), who has a gay dad, shares what it was like “Growing up in a society that questioned my gay dad’s parenting” and why he supports marriage equality.
- Californian 17-year-old Abby Bergman writes at HuffPo Teen about “My Two Moms” and why she supports marriage equality.
- A Santa Fe court has ruled that a woman who adopted a Russian child 13 years ago with her then-partner has legal status as a natural parent. We’ve seen the same kind of case many times before, usually when a biological mother tries to prevent a nonbiological mother from having parental status—but of course, a legal parent can try to prevent the nonlegal parent from rights in adoptive families, too.
- The prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, is bringing a case involving an adoptive lesbian couple to the European Court of Human Rights. It seems three Turkish brothers were placed for adoption with a Dutch lesbian couple after the birth family was deemed “abusive,” but the birth mother kidnapped two of the boys and brought them back to Turkey. ErdoÄŸan claims a lesbian couple should not have been allowed to adopt the child.
