Lots of good stuff in this roundup, including a must-read piece on faith and family, nastiness (and support) in Alabama, and greater LGBTQ representation in kids’ television.
Weekly Must-Read
If you read just one thing from this roundup, make it Kerry Cullen’s “Breaking the Horse,” about family, faith, and forgiveness. Cullen’s mom was an Evangelical Christian who had been  homeschooling her until coming out as a lesbian when Cullen was 11. Members of their community told Cullen, “You have to save your mother’s soul.” Cullen recounts how she struggled, came out as bisexual herself, and evolved her faith.
Politics and Law
- Let’s move on to a great win this week: A federal district court judge ruled yesterday in favor of three transgender students at Pine-Richland High School in suburban Pittsburgh and said their school district must allow them to use the bathrooms that match who they are. One of the students, Juliet Evancho, is the sister of singer Jackie Evancho, who performed at President Trump’s inauguration.
- The State of Indiana has filed the first brief in its appeal of a federal ruling that requires it to put both members of married same-sex couples on their children’s birth certificates.
- An Alabama Senate committee has passed a so-called “religious freedom” bill that would allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people and others in the name of religion. A similar bill passed a House committee, and now the bills move on to the floors of both chambers. A South Dakota Senate committee passed a similar bill last week.
- For some context, Molly Rampe Thomas, founder of open adoption agency Choice Network, and Kate Kight, a political associate at LPAC, explain at Salon how the “religious freedom” argument was used to pass anti-miscegenation bills and to limit access to reproductive health care–and would now allow adoption agencies to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
- And Allison Mollenkamp, a junior at the University of Alabama, writes in the student newspaper, The Crimson White, “The state here is putting children at a real risk. They’re taking away the potential of a better future because they would like to protect the discriminatory religious beliefs of a company, which is not a person, so it can’t have religious beliefs.”
- Slovenia has legalized marriage for same-sex couples, though it still bars them from jointly adopting children. Half credit.
Family Profiles
- The U.K.’s Daily Mail shares the story of Claire and Steph Eden-McIlroy,  a couple who are co-breastfeeding their infant.
- The New Westminster Record in British Columbia profiles gay dads Mike Tiney and Chris Jodoin and their path to parenthood via surrogacy.
Research
- A new study from the Netherlands finds, as many previous studies have, that “There were no significant differences found on any assessment of children’s psychological well-being in female same-sex and male same-sex parent households versus different-sex parent households.”
Entertainment
- Lindsay King-Miller writes at Vice about how she’d like to see more diversity in the portrayals of queer parents on television, saying, “As a queer mom, I want to see fictional characters I can relate to, not just because our marriages are superficially similar, but in terms of how they see the world and live their lives. I want to see archetypes of queer parenting that acknowledge the ways we aren’t just like straight people, that value us for our whole complex histories and selves.” I’d agree—and refer readers to Paige Schilt’s memoir Queer Rock Love
 (about which more here) for a print example of what this might look like.
- Disney XD cartoon Star vs. The Forces of Evil showed same-sex male and female couples kissing, which shouldn’t really be news, but is. The Disney Channel dipped a cautious toe into LGBTQ representation before, with the show Good Luck Charlie featuring a two-mom family back in 2014.
