Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) blocked the nomination of President Bush’s nominee Janet Neff to the federal courts. Brownback, who chaired her hearing, said he would only permit a vote if Neff agreed not to hear cases involving same-sex marriage, claiming that her attendance at the commitment ceremony of a neighbor and friend of 26 years
I was filling out a registration form for an online parenting community the other day. One of the questions was “Marital status?” Being an accepting sort of site, they gave the choices “Married, Partnered, Single.” My cursor went automatically to “Partnered,” since that’s what I had called myself for thirteen-plus years. “Wait,” I thought. “I’m
It’s easy for us as LGBT parents to focus all our political energies on LGBT-specific issues. I’m often guilty of it myself, especially as parenthood has reduced my available bandwidth for anything not related to teddy bears or Thomas the Tank Engine. I just received an invitation, however, from Families USA, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization
I’m very pleased to present a special feature today: an interview with Ellen Kahn, Director of the Human Rights Campaign Family Project. Ellen took time from her work at HRC (and her two children) to answer a few questions about the Family Project’s accomplishments in 2006 and what they have in store for 2007 and
Custody cases involving non-bio moms have been in the news lately, including this just in from Massachusetts: The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday that a lesbian non-bio mom had no parental rights over the five-year-old daughter she and her former partner had agreed to raise together. The women separated before marriage was an option
Everyone’s talking about Mary this week. Here are some of the more notable or amusing contributions: Pam of Pam’s House Blend is blunt: “With this development, Mary and her partner Heather Poe are going to make her father’s religious right friends go apesh*t again.” She then charts some of the rabid right’s first reactions.
Despite my misgivings about Blue Jersey’s second marriage-equality ad, I rather like their third one, which takes the perspective that a rose by any other name is ridiculous, and might as well be called a rose.
The Maryland Supreme Court heard arguments from 19 gay and lesbian residents, urging them to strike down a law banning same-sex marriage. The New Jersey State Assembly’s judiciary committee approved a bill to create civil unions with the same rights as marriage, despite a push from LGBT-rights groups to call these unions “marriage.” The full
Blue Jersey’s second ad for marriage equality features the same two women—one married, one “civil unionized”—as the first. This time the pair are doing their respective taxes. “Single, Married, Divorced, Widowed?” the civil-unionized woman reads in puzzlement. None of the categories fit her. The ad fails, however, to address the obvious comeback: “Well, won’t they
Not to be outdone by Conservative Jews, the Swedish Lutheran Church, the country’s largest denomination, has said same-sex couples will be able to have their unions blessed in any of its congregations as of January 2007. Individual priests may refuse to conduct such ceremonies, but the congregation must ensure a blessing is provided. Although Sweden
