A breaking TV alert: Al Jazeera America will be doing a segment tonight at 7:30 p.m. ET on LGBT families and adoption. One of their three guests is affiliated with the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage. The Family Equality Council, the national organization supporting LGBT families, is asking people to offer their perspectives through the online video comments and Twitter conversation about the show.
Adoptive lesbian moms Bianca Monreal and Tonie Alfonso, profiled at HuffPo, said that they believe gay people are particularly suited to be adoptive parents.
November is National Adoption Month, and the Family Equality Council has launched the “Allies for Adoption” campaign to raise awareness of a very simple thing we could do to help more children in foster care find forever homes: remove the barriers that prevent qualified LGBT people from adopting children.
This touching new video from the Family Equality Council’s “Allies for Adoption” campaign is the most poignant thing I’ve seen online in quite some time. Anyone who has ever waited for that call from an adoption agency should be able to relate.
Russian authorities have halted adoptions of Russian children by Swedish same-sex couples, reports Swedish newspaper The Local. A spokeperson for the Adoptioncentrum agency told Sveriges Television (SVT) “It’s terrible. We have 13 children in Russian orphanages today who have been offered to parents in Sweden who they have actually met.”
Michigan legislators on the state House Committee on Families, Children, and Seniors have passed three bills that would give taxpayer-funded adoption agencies the right to deny an adoption placement based on that agency’s moral or religious beliefs. This is an anti-LGBT bill, no doubt about it — but it is the children needing homes who will suffer the most. . Here’s what you can do to help stop these bills from going any further.
A new study by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute aims to look at how the Internet and social media are impacting people touched by adoption, from adopted persons to adoptive parents, birth/first parents, and adoption professionals. If you fit one of those categories, they want your input!
More stories I haven’t covered earlier, including a terrific piece by the mother of a sperm donor; a newly out lesbian mom with a major university sports program; and yet more research showing sexual orientation of parents doesn’t negatively impact children.
From the “how could I have missed this” files: While studies show [and they do] that children with same-sex parents are just as well-adjusted as those with different-sex parents, they might lead us to overlook the full experience of adopted children, wrote Frank Ligtvoet in the New York Times a few weeks back. Ligtvoet, a gay dad with two adopted children, reminds us that “motherless parenting is a misnomer.”
A second study published within the past week has concluded that how adoptive parents relate to each other is more important to their children’s development than their sexual orientation is.
