I love the start of fall. It’s still warm, but without the oppressive edge of summer heat. The nights are cool, and the air brings with it the smell of leaves about to change. It’s my favorite time of year for bike riding, when I can pedal past the first hints of yellow and orange in the foliage and feel the change of season in my bones. We’re at a season change in LGBTQ equality, too, I thought to myself on a recent ride.
The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) yesterday launched #Equality4Families, a campaign to raise awareness about the need to reform state laws so they fully protect LGBT parents’ rights to care for their children.
Today’s must-read article tries to answer the question, “What gay marriage means for the future of parenthood.”
President Obama has said that same-sex parents and their children influenced his decision to support marriage equality. And in the Washington Post recently, Janice D’Arcy asked, “Has gay parenting ‘normalized’ the perception of gay relationships?” The interaction between LGBT parenting rights and relationship rights is indeed a fascinating and important question—and one charted in part by law professor Carlos Ball, whose new book also gives us a compelling history of the expansion of LGBT parenting rights. Here’s my review of his work, originally published as my Mombian newspaper column.
Too good to wait for the next roundup: The Pennsylvania state Superior Court overturned a 25-year-old precedent that said in custody cases involving former opposite-sex couples, where one person is now in a same-sex relationship, the burden is placed on the LGB parent to prove that the same-sex relationship will have no adverse effect on
Politics and Law A must-read this week is Jacob M. Appel’s piece on the growing “sperm donors’ rights movement,” in which donors are trying to assert their claims to parenthood. New Mexico’s new parentage laws go into effect on January 1, Nancy Polikoff reminds us. The Really Quite Wonderful new law states: “a person who…consents
In my latest article for 365gay.com, I discuss the Florida adoption ruling and the sometimes fuzzy connections between parental rights and marriage rights. If you’re following the Florida case, you might also be interested in the video that the ACLU made about the plaintiff family. After the jump:
It’s been a weekend of protests for the LGBT community. The New York Times, among other places covered them, as did most LGBT news channels. Pick your favorite; I won’t list them all here. Instead, I’m going to highlight the interview that actor and lesbian mom Cynthia Nixon did on Friday with Joy Behar, who
Good news: The U.S. Supreme Court today refused to hear a case “that would have had far-reaching implications for lesbians and single women choosing to bear children,” according to law professor Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. The case involves a Kansas woman whose sperm donor
The Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled this week that adoptions by stepparents are allowed only when the stepparent is married to the child’s biological parent. In a catch-22, same-sex stepparents cannot therefore adopt because Kentucky has a constitutional amendment banning marriage of same-sex couples. The ruling holds regardless of whether the person was involved in
