NEWSLGBT PARENTING

More than 7,000 people have signed Illinois-resident Lair Scott’s Change.org petition calling on Sesame Street to marry Bert and Ernie.

“I started this Change.org petition because I believe we need more media representation of gay and lesbian people in children’s programming,” said Scott. “There are currently no LGBT characters on Sesame Street, nor in any children’s television program.”

Scott sees the campaign as about more than just LGBT characters as individuals, but as family units. According to 2010 U.S. Census data, it is estimated that one quarter of all same gender couples are raising children, and same gender couples are raising children in 96% of the counties in the United States.

“Thousands of kids are growing up in homes with two moms and two dads,” he said. “They need to see families like their own on television.”

Early in January, the U.S. State Department announced it would be changing the passport application form to say “Mother or Parent 1″ and “Father or Parent 2,”  an attempt to be more inclusive of all family structures.

Now, Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-Va.) has called the change "a bureaucratic attempt to redefine traditional parent roles." He has filed a bill that would require all federal agencies, contractors, and government-sponsored enterprises to "use the words 'mother' and 'father' when describing parents, and not the words 'parent 1' or 'parent 2' (or other similar words), in all official documents."

Several hundred thousand children are being raised by same-sex parents across the country, over 6,500 of them in Rep. Forbes' state of Virginia, according to the Williams Institute of UCLA. How exactly does Rep. Forbes expect them to complete government forms?

Sure, one can cross out and write in whatever applies to one's own family -- but many people may hesitate to do so on official forms like a passport application. And for children watching their parents complete the forms, such crossing out and amending reinforces the message that their families are marginalized.

When you think of same-sex families, what cities spring to mind? San Francisco? New York? Provincetown?

It turns out that same-sex couples in Southern states such as Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas are more likely to be raising children than those on the West Coast, in New York and in New England. In fact, San Antonio, Texas, leads the nation in the percentage of same-sex couples raising kids, at 34 percent. Jacksonville, Florida, is next, at 32 percent.

The New York Times reported on this January 19, citing research by Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at UCLA, well known for its studies of LGBT demographics and economics. Gates and others have been analyzing the new data from Census 2010, and found some interesting trends. For example, Black or Latino same-sex couples are twice as likely as white ones to be raising children, and more likely to be struggling economically.

That contradicts almost every image of same-sex parents we see in the mainstream (and even much LGBT) media. They are almost always white and middle- to upper-class. Consider: Both Showtime's The L Word and ABC's Modern Family ran episodes in which a couple of same-sex parents try to get their child into an exclusive preschool. And new dads Elton John and David Furnish aren't exactly hurting for money. Although it may indeed help the cause of acceptance to see their family in the media, they are not representative of the whole.

Back in July 2010, I wrote of my experience getting a new passport for my son, who has two moms, and the difficulties presented by the “Father’s Name” and “Mother’s Name” blanks on the application. Over 900 of you signed the petition asking the State Department to revise the passport application to say “Parent” and “Parent” -- making it more inclusive of all families.

Success! On December 22, the State Department announced it will be making this change, and the application will be revised to say "Parent" and "Parent."

The Family Equality Council (FEC), which has led the charge for the passport change, deserves our recognition and thanks for their work in making this happen.

The State Department has additionally changed the Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA) -- a document confirming that a child born overseas to a U.S. citizen acquired U.S. citizenship at birth -- to say "Parent" and "Parent." The CRBA still states, however, "The following items pertain to the biological parents." For families with one biological and one non-biological parent, this continues to present a problem.

Emily Hecht-McGowan, Director of Public Policy and Community Engagement for FEC, explained that the CRBA is controlled by U.S. immigration regulations and confers citizenship through biology, in order to protect children born out of wedlock to U.S. citizens abroad. She says this is one of many issues regarding children born abroad to U.S. same-sex parents that FEC is continuing to address in Washington.

As a helpless Anglophile, one might think that I would have some fuzzy feelings toward Australia. At the very least, I must have some sort of sisterly connection. Here we are, the offspring of a once mighty British Empire. Only they got to keep the parliamentary system and English spelling.

But I never felt the same affection for Australia as I felt for, say, Canada. Mostly it’s because I don’t want to deal with the risk of death every time I put on my shoes. (Also, don’t steal the name Oz. I live in Oz. Do you have a Tin Man or a Wicked Witch or a Cowardly Lion?)

Because I have not pinned all my irrational hopes for Utopia on Australia, one would not assume that I could feel utterly betrayed by this island continent. And yet, here we are.

On December 27, the Daily Telegraph reported that a decision made by the New South Wales Administrative Decisions Tribunal says, in no uncertain terms, that the law allows religious charities to ban gay foster parents. The tribunal reversed an original decision that ordered Wesley Mission – the church in question – to change its policies and pay the gay couple AUD 10,000. But this decision was overturned because the New South Wales Anti-Discrimination Law provides broad exemptions for religious practice.

If you’re like me, you find this massively annoying. Go ahead and deprive innocent children of loving homes! As long as God says it’s O.K.

Whenever I get too frustrated with the pace of change for LGBT rights here in the U.S., I think of what things are like in many other places in the world. Places like Russia, where the level of visibility, understanding, and rights is even less than it is in most of our country.

An LGBT rights organization in St. Petersburg, Russia,  however, hopes to increase visibility and awareness with a series of five posters celebrating lesbian parents and their children. The group Coming Out is launching the “Rainbow Parents” project, according to a press release, "to present short stories from the life of gay families, to show their existence for the Russian society. The current threat of homophobia makes many gay families in Russia hide their sexual orientation from children, relatives and friends, from the society."

The posters touch on five topics: “Courage”, “Dignity”, “Rights”, “Happiness” and “Coming out”. You can view them in the original Russian or via Google Translate for a (more-or-less accurate) English translation. Although the words may sound rough to our ears, the love of the families shines through.

"My son is gay. Or he’s not. I don’t care. He is still my son. And he is 5. And I am his mother. And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don’t want to know you," starts the rapid-fire mommy blogger post last week that is being met with all sorts of national attention.

The post, a seemingly local, innocuous, and somewhat private attempt to showcase one open-minded mother's anger at the judgmental PTA moms for questioning her young son's choice to dress up in a female Halloween costume (Daphne from Scooby Doo), has taken the abyss that is the world wide web by storm. "My Son is Gay," the post is entitled, matching the lede by the mother, Sarah, on her blog Nerdy Apple Bottom.

The post has seen countless Facebook shares and retweets, and is getting picked up by news outlets nationwide. 38,938 comments later on the blog post itself, and word is still out whether the post is detrimental or beneficial to awareness around LGBTQ identity for parents and their for kids coming out.

A blog post by social media writer Caroline Howard on Forbes.com raises concerns about how the soccer mom essentially outed her five-year old son to the whole wide world without his consent, and that such behavior could well be dangerous. "I wish saying, 'My son is gay,' was as neutral as, 'He’s a people person,'" Howard writes. "It’s not. The memory of bullying victim Tyler Clementi is still too raw. His mom’s blog post is now part of Boo’s digital fingerprint–forever – which may or may not be a problem should he ever apply for a visa to Iran, be vetted for the Marines or do a Google search."

The Newbery Medal. The Caldecott Medal. Anyone who knows even the slightest thing about children's literature knows these are the top honors in the field here in the U.S. Now, the American Library Association (ALA) has announced it will add an annual award for "English-language works for children and teens of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered experience."

The Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award will become  part of the ALA's Youth Media Awards, which also include multicultural awards such as the Coretta Scott King Book Award, given "to encourage the artistic expression of the African American experience." The new award will be bestowed by the ALA’s Stonewall Book Awards Committee of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered Round Table.

The ALA has been a long-time supporter of books with LGBT content. It launched the original Stonewall Book Award (for adult readers) in 1971.  Since 2008, it has produced an annual Rainbow Bibliography of children's and young adult books with LGBT content, which aims to be a broad guide for librarians, bookstore managers, and readers. The Bibliography is not as exclusive as the new award will be, but is still selective, with the books chosen for quality as well as LGBT content. (As an LGBT parent blogger, I can confirm that there are any number of well meaning but poorly written LGBT children's books out there.)

AOL News on October 17 ran an article by Paul Kix titled, "Study: Gay Parents More Likely to Have Gay Kids." It reports on the research of Walter Schumm, a professor of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University. The problem is, there is little validity to any of Schumm's claims or methodology.

Kix explained that Schumm undertook the research in order to get at the truth behind the claims of Paul Cameron, who has also tried to prove LGBTQ parents are more likely to have LGBTQ kids. Cameron has little credibility outside of far-right circles; the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) calls him "an infamous anti-gay propagandist whose one-man statistical chop shop, the Family Research Institute, churns out hate literature masquerading as legitimate science." SPLC lists the Family Research Institute as a hate group.

Kix tried to distance Schumm from Cameron's more blatantly bigoted position — but in truth, Schumm sat on the board of Cameron's Empirical Journal of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior, an online publication that never gained much traction.

Schumm's statistics are also not much more credible than those of Cameron. Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has done a thorough job debunking his methodology.  Schumm conducted a "meta-analysis" of 10 existing sources to draw his conclusions — but Burroway notes that all of the  sources "were from general-audience books about LGBT parenting and families, most of which are available on Amazon.com. Schumm read the books, took notes on each parent and child described in the book, examined their histories, and counted up who was gay and who was straight among the kids." In other words, the sample was neither random nor representative. At least one of these books, Abigail Garner's Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, was even intentionally non-random. Burroway cites Garner's explanation: "I deliberately aimed to have 50% of the kids interviewed to be queer. Not because it is statistically reflective of the population, but to give it balance of perspective."

I don’t really like kids. I mean, I would never beat them, or anything. They just sort of grate on my nerves. And I know that kids are technically necessary for human beings as a species to remain, so I tolerate their piercing voices and inability to walk in a straight line at the farmer’s market. I’m just saying that kids aren’t my thing. But … I also cling the quaint belief that once a kid is here, it’s our responsibility to make sure they grow up as healthy and happy as possible. As a recent piece from Mother Jones points out, all too often, LGBT foster kids are being left in the dust.

The article recounts the story of Kenneth Jones, a gay teen who has been bounced from house to house because foster parents would not accept his sexuality. But his story is not isolated. For example, the article cites Jerry Walters, vice president of the Boys’ Home Association, saying that in a recent survey conducted by the organization, only 21 out of 246 families were willing to take in a LGBT child.

This is clearly horrifying; shameful, even. But the article gives some reason to hope. Several states have taken steps to address this horrible situation. Recruiting more gay and lesbian couples into the foster parent fold is one solution, but laws that strike at the ability of gay couples to adopt are counterproductive.