LGBTQ Parenting Roundup: An Apple for the Teacher Edition

Here’s what’s happening that I haven’t covered elsewhere, including progress—and protests—in LGBTQ-inclusive education, mixed results in Tennessee, and more same-sex penguin moms!

Schools and Education

Colorado legislators voted to require schools to teach a K-12 public-school curriculum that includes “the history, culture, and social contributions” of LGBTQ people as well as that of American Indians, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a gay dad himself, will review the bill before signing, a spokesperson told Reuters. Colorado would follow California in requiring such a curriculum; New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts have also made moves in this direction. “One challenge has been instructing teachers, who may have never learned LGBTQ history themselves,” Reuters notes. That’s why books like these are so valuable.
On the flip side, days after the Rocklin Unified School District north of Sacramento, California, approved a new, LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum at elementary schools, about 600 parents kept their kids home from school Friday in protest. One parent said, according to NBC affiliate KCRA 3, “It’s too soon to introduce titles such as ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay’ to a second-grader,” she said. Yeah, I’ve had a few things to say about this sort of thinking.
In the U.K., after protests erupted in Birmingham over an LGBTQ curriculum for primary school children titled No Outsiders, the program was suspended indefinitely in several schools and the city council has asked a leading prosecutor to mediate the dispute.
Need something that will give you hope after all that? Here’s a piece from Mutha Magazine about five artists and educators who run the monthly Little Rainbows Storytime at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, New York. “We decided if four people came we would consider it a success,” writes Ellen Baxt. “Seventy people showed up and we definitely did not have enough cheddar bunnies.” Baxt also offers many useful tips for how you, too, can run a similar storytime. My favorite quote from the piece, however, is this:

I wanted to read in public the books that I seek out for my own kid, to teach her about the truths of the world, and I wanted her to listen to books with other kids who were grappling with the horrifying and beautiful truths that some of the best children’s books unveil. Books about the way things really are. And ones about brown people and gay people doing regular things, because having two dads is not actually a plotline, though we are grateful to the brave ones who wrote those books three decades ago, because to say our family compositions out loud in print was revolutionary, but it’s not the 80’s anymore.

Amen.

Politics and Law

After a settlement in a case that found two foster care and adoption agencies were violating Michigan’s nondiscrimination laws by refusing to work with same-sex couples, one of the agencies that had refused, Bethany Christian Services, has now said it will comply with the settlement. St. Vincent Catholic Charities, however, the other agency, is challenging the settlement in federal court. Bethany had also changed its position to accept same-sex parents in Philadelphia, avoiding being caught up in a similar lawsuit there, where Catholic Social Services (CSS) had to be told by a federal judge not to discriminate.
The Tennessee legislature delayed a bill that would have allowed adoption and foster care agencies to cite religious beliefs as a reason to discriminate against LGBTQ prospective parents and youth in care, among others. Unfortunately, two anti-transgender bills moved forward, including one that would ban students from using the rest room corresponding to their gender identity and another, recently stripped of explicitly anti-trans language, that says locker rooms and restrooms are subject to the state’s indecent exposure laws.

Family Profiles

Good Housekeeping profiles actor Sara Gilbert, who is leaving her show The Talk in order to spend more time with her spouse, musician Linda Perry, and their three children.
Her, an Irish women’s lifestyle site, profiles spouses Ellie Grange and Lucille Furlong, who had an easy first pregnancy through IUI (intrauterine insemination), but struggled for years to have their second child, first through IUI and then through IVF (in vitro fertilization).
In other Irish news, more than half of the penguin pairs at Dingle Oceanworld Aquarium in Kerry are same-sex pairs, reports the Irish Mirror. The animal manager observed, “The lesbian ones will take action if they feel broody. They will waddle over to a male to do what needs to be done and rear the chick with their female partner.”