It’s unfortunate, but airlines aren’t the only thing affected by a big snow storm. The so called “Snow Storm of the Century” could also delay Congress weighing in on DC’s decision to make gay marriage legal. How do these two topics even relate you ask??
Well, by law Congress has 30 legislative days to review all laws signed by the DC Mayor (Adrian Fenty – in case you’re thinking it’s still “cracked-out” Mayor Marion Berry). If the Capitol shuts down, so does the clock that counts down the 30 days.
What this means is that gay marriage may not become law until mid-March. Fortunately, even with all the talk about the devastating defeat the Democrats had in the Senate in Massachusetts, we still have 59 votes and a much larger margin in the House. Gay marriage hasn’t been legal or recognized in the 233 years we’ve been a country, so what’s another week or two…right?!
A Harvard professor testifying in a case challenging California’s gay marriage ban said Tuesday that procreation is historically not the only function of marriage.
In her second day of testimony, Nancy Cott, a U.S. history professor and the author of a book on marriage as a public institution, disputed a statement by a defense lawyer that states have a compelling interest to restrict marriage to heterosexual couples for the sake of procreation.
Cott said marriage also has served an economic purpose, with each spouse doing different jobs in the partnership. As the purposes of marriage have changed, the reasons to bar same-sex couples from marrying have gone away, she said.
“It seems to me that by excluding same-sex couples from the ability to marry and to engage in this institution, that society is actually denying itself another resource for stability and social growth,” she said.
Cott conceded under cross-examination that she couldn’t predict the consequences for society of same-sex marriage.
The lawsuit — brought by two same-sex couple unable to marry because of California’s Proposition 8 — is the first in a federal court to decide the constitutionality of state bans on gay marriage.
Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker is presiding over the case without a jury.
I was washing the dishes today because we don’t have a dishwasher, which I have to say I very much resent. It’s not from lack of effort on our part. When I was pregnant I had 3 people come to the house and tell me that they couldn’t install a dishwasher in our kitchen unless we tore out the counter tops and brought them up 2 inches higher. I didn’t believe the first guy, I got even angrier with the second, and by the time the third one said “We just can’t do it, even with the smallest dishwasher on the market”, I cried. Susan still doesn’t believe it and will occasionally say, “I really gotta call someone about that”.
Now that I’m resigned to having dry hands for the rest of my life, I take turns doing the dishes with Susan. Tonight, I got a chuckle as I rinsed our blue dinner plate while thinking about the therapist that Susan and I went to this summer. I can’t quite remember the context of the topic but she told us that doing dishes is a mother’s only time to herself and we should give each other this time. Is she fucking crazy? Perhaps we should invite her over for some “alone time” in our dimly lit kitchen, as we’re clearly not appreciating our dirty dishes.
Ironically, tonight I caught myself enjoying my alone time- me and my blue plate kicking back thinking.
Love
I was daydreaming about how much a relationship changes from inception. Wow almost 13 years ago Susan and I started dating. We were IN LOVE. We’d make out in the rain in my car for hours. There was no good reason why we didn’t find our way into my apartment, I guess we couldn’t wait that long. We were possessive and jealous for all the right reasons. If I may say so, we were cute.
Marriage
5 years later we got engaged and that brought another layer of romance to the relationship. I remember the night I realized that I would have to worry about her for the rest of my life. Worry in the way that made my stomach ache and flutter. Worry that she is happy and healthy and will drive herself home safely to me every night. This was a love that I hadn’t experienced before. This love hurt.
Then our first purchase of a home together- this came simultaneous with our wedding. All very sweet and romantic in the beginning until I started to realize that I was about to spend the rest of my life with this person and with that comes a lifetime full of habits to which I was not accustomed. Some of these habits I will later adopt, others I will forever hate. This realization spun me into a depression- I have just lost all sense of self and may never get it back. I began to analyze and nit-pick until something that, objectively speaking, was very minor, was now put under a microscope and might be- in my mind- the cause for divorce. This dissipated when I labeled it as fear of the unknown journey that we as a pair were embarking on. Once this realization was made, I jumped willingly into being an ideal wife. My priorities slowly shifted to striving to throw an entertaining dinner party and attempting to master a good dish (still haven’t done that). The late nights out at bars with single friends became Tivo and cuddling at home.
Children
Then kids come, or in our case the 2 plus year attempt at having a kid. This brought misunderstandings, hurt feelings, lots of TV at night and much less cuddling. We were weak; neither of us could take care of each other and the love changed to survival. Once our daughter finally came, we were ready for love again. The beginning weeks with Sophia were as good as it gets. Romantic fires, giddy conversations from lack of sleep, a re-kindled spark and a complete family, dog included. But then the novelty wore off and we were left with “getting through the day”. Our one goal in common was to keep that baby alive. This was an ominous task that haunted me at night. Conversations were about poop and diapers and feeding times and romance was off our radar. This stage lasted a very long time.
Doing the Dishes
Now I have entered what I like to call the “Doin’ the Dishes” stage – I have become content with life as I know it. The baby is safe, healthy and happy. The dates come more frequently and the conversations are interesting again. Life is complete and all that has brought me to this stage is bundled up in a beautiful loving package that Susan and I can share together once more. The cycle has started over, but with history and years of understanding and love. Layers that, when peeled back, expose the deepest parts of me that no one else could touch.
So maybe this was what our therapist was really getting at all along, ya think? Nah, I think she just likes doing the dishes.
It has been apparent for a while now that we live in child-centric times. We approach parenting with a single-mindedness that baffles our own parents, and certainly their parents, who thought children should be seen and not heard. We think it’s just fine to put our kids ahead of our careers, our relationships, our social lives, and even if we aren’t doing so, everyone around us seems to be.
We demand that public policy — on health care, or education, or stimulus money — consider the needs of children as surely as it does the needs of doctors, teachers and businesses. (I am not saying that public policy makers always respond, mind you, but “what about the children?” is certainly a rallying cry.) We devour research on how to build our children’s self-esteem, to keep them from being bullied and to expand their intellects.
It is striking, then, how comparatively rarely children are mentioned as an argument in favor of gay marriage. The issue is framed as a debate over equality and justice, of personal freedom and the relation of church and state, not about what is good for kids.
That’s partly because, until relatively recently, we didn’t know much about the children of same-sex couples. The earliest studies, dating to the 1970s, were based on small samples and could include only families who stepped forward to be counted. But about 20 years ago, the Census Bureau added a category for unwed partners, which included many gay partners, providing more demographic data. Not every gay couple that is married, or aspiring to marry, has children, but an increasing number do: approximately 1 in 5 male same-sex couples and 1 in 3 female same-sex couples are raising children, up from 1 in 20 male couples and 1 in 5 female couples in 1990.
This growth, coupled with the passage of time, means there is a large cohort of children who are now old enough to yield solid data. And the portrait emerging tells us something about the effects of gay parenting. It also contains lessons for all parents.
“These children do just fine,” says Abbie E. Goldberg, an assistant professor in the department of psychology at Clark University, who concedes there are some who will continue to believe that gay parents are a danger to their children, in spite of a growing web of psychological and sociological evidence to the contrary. Her new book, “Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children,” is an analysis of more than 100 academic studies, most looking at groups of 30 to 150 subjects, and primarily on lesbian mothers, though of late there is a spike in research about gay fathers.
In most ways, the accumulated research shows, children of same-sex parents are not markedly different from those of heterosexual parents. They show no increased incidence of psychiatric disorders, are just as popular at school and have just as many friends. While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay.
More enlightening than the similarities, however, are the differences, the most striking of which is that these children tend to be less conventional and more flexible when it comes to gender roles and assumptions than those raised in more traditional families.
There are data that show, for instance, that daughters of lesbian mothers are more likely to aspire to professions that are traditionally considered male, like doctors or lawyers — 52 percent in one study said that was their goal, compared with 21 percent of daughters of heterosexual mothers, who are still more likely to say they want to be nurses or teachers when they grow up. (The same study found that 95 percent of boys from both types of families choose the more masculine jobs.) Girls raised by lesbians are also more likely to engage in “roughhousing” and to play with “male-gendered-type toys” than girls raised by straight mothers. And adult children of gay parents appear more likely than the average adult to work in the fields of social justice and to have more gay friends in their social mix.
Heterosexual couples might want to pay attention to these results. While the gay-marriage debate is playing out on the public stage, a more private debate is taking place in kitchens and bedrooms over who does what in a heterosexual marriage (takes out the trash, spends more time with the kids, feels free to head out with their friends for a beer). The philosophical underpinnings of both conversations — gay marriage and equality in parenting — are similar, in that both focus on equality for adults (in the case of heterosexuals, mostly wives). But even if parents who seek parity do so for their own sanity and in pursuit of their own ideals, might it not also be better for their children?
Yes, if less conventional, more tolerant children are your goal. Because if the children of gays and lesbians are different, it is presumably related to the way they were raised — by parents with a view of domestic roles that differs from most of their heterosexual peers.
Same-sex couples, it seems, are less likely to impose certain gender-based expectations on their children, says M. V. Lee Badgett, director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author of “When Gay People Get Married: What Happens When Societies Legalize Same-Sex Marriage.” Studies of lesbian parents have found that they “are more feminist parents,” she says, “more open to girls playing with trucks and boys playing with dolls,” with fewer worries about conforming to perceived norms.
They are also, by definition, less likely to impose gender-based expectations on themselves. “Same-sex parents tend to be more equal in parenting,” Goldberg says, while noting that no generalization can apply to all parents of any sexual orientation. On the whole, though, lesbian mothers (there’s little data here on gay dads) tend not to divide chores and responsibilities according to gender-based roles, Goldberg says, “because you have taken gender out the equation. There’s much more fluidity than in many heterosexual relationships.”
So while we arguably spend too much time focusing on children, when it comes to the topic of nontraditional marriage, maybe we should start focusing on them more. One of the few parenting conversations that is not child-centric might be well served to become so. These are questions of rights and equality for adults, yes, but also questions of what is good for the kids.
Lisa Belkin is a contributing writer and the author of the Motherlode blog.
For one thing, he’s smart. Scary smart. A student in the West Fork School District in Washington County, he skipped a grade this year, going directly from the third to the fifth. When his family goes for a drive, discussions are much more apt to be about Teddy Roosevelt and terraforming Mars than they are about Spongebob Squarepants and what’s playing on Radio Disney.
It was during one of those drives that the discussion turned to the pledge of allegiance and what it means. Laura Phillips is Will’s mother. “Yes, my son is 10,” she said. “But he’s probably more aware of the meaning of the pledge than a lot of adults. He’s not just doing it rote recitation. We raised him to be aware of what’s right, what’s wrong, and what’s fair.”
Will’s family has a number of gay friends. In recent years, Laura Phillips said, they’ve been trying to be a straight ally to the gay community, going to the pride parades and standing up for the rights of their gay and lesbian neighbors. They’ve been especially dismayed by the effort to take away the rights of homosexuals – the right to marry, and the right to adopt. Given that, Will immediately saw a problem with the pledge of allegiance.
“I’ve always tried to analyze things because I want to be lawyer,” Will said. “I really don’t feel that there’s currently liberty and justice for all.”
After asking his parents whether it was against the law not to stand for the pledge, Will decided to do something. On Monday, Oct. 5, when the other kids in his class stood up to recite the pledge of allegiance, he remained sitting down. The class had a substitute teacher that week, a retired educator from the district, who knew Will’s mother and grandmother. Though the substitute tried to make him stand up, he respectfully refused. He did it again the next day, and the next day. Each day, the substitute got a little more cross with him. On Thursday, it finally came to a head. The teacher, Will said, told him that she knew his mother and grandmother, and they would want him to stand and say the pledge.
“She got a lot more angry and raised her voice and brought my mom and my grandma up,” Will said. “I was fuming and was too furious to really pay attention to what she was saying. After a few minutes, I said, ‘With all due respect, ma’am, you can go jump off a bridge.’ ”
Will was sent to the office, where he was given an assignment to look up information about the flag and what it represents. Meanwhile, the principal called his mother.
“She said we have to talk about Will, because he told a sub to jump off a bridge,” Laura Phillips said. “My first response was: Why? He’s not just going to say this because he doesn’t want to do his math work.”
Eventually, Phillips said, the principal told her that the altercation was over Will’s refusal to stand for the pledge of allegiance, and admitted that it was Will’s right not to stand. Given that, Laura Phillips asked the principal when they could expect an apology from the teacher. “She said, ‘Well I don’t think that’s necessary at this point,’ ” Phillips said.
After Phillips put a post on the instant-blogging site twitter.com about the incident, several of her friends got angry and alerted the news media. Meanwhile, Will Phillips still refuses to stand during the pledge of allegiance. Though many of his friends at school have told him they support his decision, those who don’t have been unkind, and louder.
“They [the kids who don't support him] are much more crazy, and out of control and vocal about it than supporters are.”
Given that his protest is over the rights of gays and lesbians, the taunts have taken a predictable bent. “In the lunchroom and in the hallway, they’ve been making comments and doing pranks, and calling me gay,” he said. “It’s always the same people, walking up and calling me a gaywad.”
Even so, Will said that he can’t foresee anything in the near future that will make him stand for the pledge. To help him deal with the peer pressure, his parents have printed off posts in his support on blogs and websites. “We’ve told him that people here might not support you, but we’ve shown him there are people all over that support you,” Phillips said. “It’s really frustrating to him that people are being so immature.”
At the end of our interview, I ask young Will a question that might be a civics test nightmare for your average 10-year-old. Will’s answer, though, is good enough — simple enough, true enough — to give me a little rush of goose pimples. What does being an American mean?
“Freedom of speech,” Will says, without even stopping to think. “The freedom to disagree. That’s what I think pretty much being an American represents.”
With great sadness- The Next Family reports this news as read on Google hosted news
By: GLENN ADAMS and DAVID CRARY
PORTLAND, Maine — Gay-marriage opponents are claiming victory in a closely watched referendum in Maine on a new state law that would have allowed same-sex couples to wed.
The law in question was passed by the Legislature in May but never took effect because of a petition drive by conservatives.
With more than 84 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday, the side seeking to repeal the law had 53 percent of the vote. Their campaign organizer, Frank Schubert, claimed victory and declared that Maine voters had helped preserve the institution of marriage.
Gay-marriage supporters refused to concede, holding out hope that that the tide might turn as the final returns came in. They had been hoping Maine would become the first state to approve same-sex marriage at the ballot box.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. Google hosted news
From- The New York Times
By: ABBY GOODNOUGH
Less than a week before Maine voters decide whether to repeal the state’s new same-sex marriage law, donations and volunteers are pouring in to sway what both sides call a nationally significant fight.
Supporters of the marriage law, which the Legislature approved in May, have far more money and ground troops than opponents, who have been led by the Roman Catholic Church. Yet most polls show the two sides neck and neck, suggesting that gay couples here, as in California last year, could lose the right to marry just six months after they gained it.
Although Maine’s population is a tiny fraction of California’s and the battle here has been comparatively low profile, it comes at a crucial point in the same-sex marriage movement. Still reeling from last year’s defeat in California, gay-rights advocates say a defeat here could further a perception that only judges and politicians embrace same-sex marriage.
If Maine’s law is upheld, however, it would be the movement’s first victory at the ballot box; voters in about 30 states have banned same-sex marriage.
Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts and Vermont allow gay couples to marry, but courts and legislatures, not voters, made it possible.
“It’s a defining moment,” said Marc Mutty, chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, which is leading the repeal effort. “What happens here in Maine is going to have a mushrooming effect on the issue at large.”
Maine had planned to allow same-sex marriage starting in September, but put it off until the referendum is decided. It is the only state with a same-sex marriage question on its ballot this fall.
The outcome could have particular resonance in California, where same-sex marriage supporters have been debating how soon to seek a repeal of their own state’s ban.
Mr. Mutty’s group has repeatedly warned voters that if same-sex marriage survives in Maine, public schools will most likely teach children about it. That strategy proved effective in California, and even after Maine’s attorney general announced this month that the state would not require same-sex marriage to be taught, opponents have continued raising the possibility.
One of their television advertisements warns that in Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2003, some teachers answer “thoroughly and explicitly” when students ask about gay sex.
But Stand for Marriage has not been able to advertise nearly as much as the lead group campaigning to save the law. That group, Protect Maine Equality, has raised $4 million, compared with Stand for Marriage’s $2.6 million. Its overarching message is that all people, including gay men and lesbians, should be treated equally under the law.
“You may disagree,” a gray-haired lobsterman says in a Protect Maine Equality advertisement, “but people have a right to live the way they want to live.”
The group has raised much of its money on the Internet, where it has also recruited volunteers from around the country with a Web site, www.travelforchange.org. Stace McDaniel, a retired teacher from Atlanta, said he decided to spend a few weeks volunteering for Protect Maine Equality after attending his first same-sex wedding this summer.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” said Mr. McDaniel, 57, who said he took out a $5,000 home equity line of credit to finance his trip. “It was a chance to do something really important. I don’t know anyone in Maine, but here I am.”
One of the volunteers working phones at the Stand for Maine offices last Thursday was Bonnie Johnstone of Portland, who said she had decided to help after hearing about the campaign at her Mormon church. But while Mormons played a huge role in California’s same-sex marriage ban — providing reserves of money and volunteers — they appear to be far less involved here, partly because the Mormon Church has a much smaller presence in New England.
The repeal effort has drawn a small number of volunteers from other states, Mr. Mutty said, including a group of students from Brigham Young University, a Mormon institution in Utah.
Stand for Marriage hired the same consulting firm that ran the California campaign against same-sex marriage, Schubert Flint Public Affairs, based in Sacramento, to produce its advertisements. And more than half of its financial support has come from the National Organization for Marriage, a conservative Christian group based in New Jersey that has fought same-sex marriage in other states.
But the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland has played the most tangible role in the repeal movement, even urging its parishes to collect donations by passing a second collection plate during Mass.
The Maine Ethics Commission is investigating whether the National Organization for Marriage has violated the state’s campaign finance laws by keeping its donors anonymous. The group has responded with a lawsuit challenging Maine’s financial reporting requirements.
With no big races drawing voters to the polls this year, both sides say that get-out-the-vote efforts will be crucial. Supporters of same-sex marriage are counting on college students, while opponents are focusing on older voters from the state’s more conservative central and northern regions.
“Their voters are going to be weather-dependent, mood-dependent,” Mr. Mutty said. “Our voters tend to vote no matter what.”
Since polls have historically undercounted opponents of same-sex marriage — and none have shown supporters of the law more than a few points ahead, anyway — Protect Maine Equality is taking nothing for granted.
“We have every reason to think this will be a razor-thin election,” said Jesse Connolly, the group’s campaign manager.
