This week’s quote comes from Catherine Couvert, a lesbian mom in Northern Ireland, who addresses her country’s failure to move ahead with a proposal allowing joint adoption by same-sex and unmarried couples.
Here are some of the LGBT parenting stories that caught my eye this week, which I haven’t written about in other posts:
Zach Wahls, the former University of Iowa student whose speech about marriage equality to the state House went viral—twice—on YouTube, has a new book out today about his family: My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family.
Marriage inequality harms children. Obvious to most readers here, I imagine—but the right-wing has long owned the “best interests of the children” argument in advertising and media. Now, however, one LGBT advocacy coalition is taking back that argument, in hopes of defeating yet another state constitutional ban on marriage for same-sex couples, this time Amendment One in North Carolina. See their new ad after the jump.
I wrote the other day about Ohio mom Jennifer Tyrrell, whom the Boy Scouts expelled as den leader of her son’s Cub Scout troop because she is a lesbian. Now, her Change.org petition asking the Boy Scouts to reconsider their policy of not permitting gay Scouts or leaders has gained nearly 130,000 signatures. Tyrrell also
Got 10 minutes? You’d be hard pressed to find a better way to spend it right now than to watch “Listen from the Heart” (after the jump), a short documentary film that profiles lesbian moms Laura Fitch and Jaime Jenett, and their son, Simon Lev Fitch-Jenett. The moms talk about dealing with their son’s serious heart condition, being a stay-at-home mom and an employed mom, respectively, being pregnant and butch, managing their relationship to each other, and more. The film is part of The Devotion Project, a series of six films showing “LGBTQ couples and the love they share.”
Today marks the 16th annual Day of Silence, an event sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) where students from middle school to college take some form of a vow of silence to bring attention to anti-LGBT name-calling, bullying and harassment. Looking back at my posts from previous years for and around the event, however, I have to ask myself: Are things getting better?
Lauren and Sarah of Two Brides to Two Mummies ask “What’s In a Name?”
Like the Bard who first posed that question, they live in England. They are hoping to add a child to their home in Birmingham, and are planning to marry (legally, have a civil partnership) next year. While their post is not about parenting specifically, it raises an issue that I think many lesbian couples ponder, especially if they are considering children: Do you choose a common last name, and if so, what?
The Boy Scouts of America has recently told Jennifer Tyrrell, a lesbian mom in Ohio, that because of her sexual orientation, she can no longer serve as the den leader of her son’s local Cub Scout chapter. Although parents of the other boys in the den supported her, the local Boy Scout council revoked her membership. After the jump, find out what Tyrrell and the other parents are doing in response, and how you can help.
Today is the deadline for filing 2011 U.S. tax returns. In a timely piece, Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida (and a mom to the adorable boy who met First Lady Michelle Obama recently), writes about federal tax inequality for same-sex couples. She gives us our quote of the week:
