New Pope: Francis believes gay adoption is child abuse

Argentina’s Jorge Mario Bergoglio was chosen by the conclave of cardinals as the next leader of the Roman Catholic Church
| By Joe Morgan – GayStarNews.com

Pope Francis was elected as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church today (13 March).

Argentinian Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 76, was chosen by the conclave of 115 cardinals as a successor to Benedict XVI.

Tens of thousands of faithful Catholics broke into cheers as the white smoke indicated the new pontiff had obtained the required two thirds majority, which happened in the fifth round of voting over two days.

Francis is still a conservative choice, but has taught the ‘importance of respecting gay individuals’.

However he strongly opposed same-sex marriage legislation introduced in 2010 by the Argentine government, calling it a ‘destructive attack on God’s plan’.

In a letter to the monasteries of Buenos Aires, he wrote: ‘Let’s not be naive, we’re not talking about a simple political battle; it is a destructive pretension against the plan of God.

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in Adoption / In the News / Religious  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Married Gay Couple In Iowa Fighting For Both To Be Listed On Child’s Birth Certificate

By    On Top Magazine Staff
Published:    March 04, 2013

The Iowa Supreme Court is considering a legal challenge brought by a married lesbian couple denied the right for both to be listed on their child’s birth certificate.

In a landmark 2009 decision, the state’s highest court unanimously struck down the state’s law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

However, the Iowa Department of Public Health has refused to issue birth certificates listing married spouses of the same gender as the legal parents of newborn children.

Heather and Melissa Gartner are one such couple.  Despite being married, only Heather Gartner, their daughter’s biological mother, is listed on the birth certificate.

“When you have somebody tell you that your marriage is not equal to your counterparts, because of who you’re married to, you can’t be a parent to this child – it’s very hurtful,” Melissa Gartner told CNN Radio.  “I mean, honestly, when the first birth certificate came, it felt like someone had smacked you.”

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Republicans Sign Brief in Support of Gay Marriage

February 25, 2013
New York Times

WASHINGTON — Dozens of prominent Republicans — including top advisers to former President George W. Bush, four former governors and two members of Congress — have signed a legal brief arguing that gay people have a constitutional right to marry, a position that amounts to a direct challenge to Speaker John A. Boehner and reflects the civil war in the party since the November election.

The document will be submitted this week to the Supreme Court in support of a suit seeking to strike down Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative barring same-sex marriage, and all similar bans. The court will hear back-to-back arguments next month in that case and another pivotal gay rights case that challenges the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act.

The Proposition 8 case already has a powerful conservative supporter: Theodore B. Olson, the former solicitor general under Mr. Bush and one of the suit’s two lead lawyers. The amicus, or friend-of-the-court, brief is being filed with Mr. Olson’s blessing. It argues, as he does, that same-sex marriage promotes family values by allowing children of gay couples to grow up in two-parent homes, and that it advances conservative values of “limited government and maximizing individual freedom.”

Legal analysts said the brief had the potential to sway conservative justices as much for the prominent names attached to it as for its legal arguments. The list of signers includes a string of Republican officials and influential thinkers — 75 as of Monday evening — who are not ordinarily associated with gay rights advocacy, including some who are speaking out for the first time and others who have changed their previous positions.

Among them are Meg Whitman, who supported Proposition 8 when she ran for California governor; Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida and Richard Hanna of New York; Stephen J. Hadley, a Bush national security adviser; Carlos Gutierrez, a commerce secretary to Mr. Bush; James B. Comey, a top Bush Justice Department official; David A. Stockman, President Ronald Reagan’s first budget director; and Deborah Pryce, a former member of the House Republican leadership from Ohio who is retired from Congress.

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Should sperm donors have parental duties?

By Pia Gadkari BBC News,
Washington – 2/21/2013

As more women become pregnant using sperm donated by men they know, the law must establish what role, if any, these men should play in their biological children’s lives.

When William Marotta answered a Craigslist ad seeking a sperm donor, he was just trying to help two women start a family.

Over a few days in 2009, he gave the couple several donations in plastic cups and signed an agreement giving up all his parental rights. He thought he would never see them again.

But in October he got an alarming letter: though the women did not want him to be part of the child’s life, the state of Kansas was suing him for child support.

Mr Marotta, 45, discovered that the women raising his biological daughter had separated and the child’s mother, facing financial difficulties, had enrolled the girl in Medicaid, a government healthcare programme for the poor.

The state asked her for the name of the girl’s father, who officials said was financially responsible for the medical expenses incurred.

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With No Shortcut to a Green Card, Gay Couples Leave U.S.

February 17, 2013
New York Times

Not long ago, Brandon Perlberg had a growing law practice and a Manhattan apartment he shared with his partner, who is British. They hosted themed dinner parties and wine tastings for a wide circle of friends.

But Mr. Perlberg, an American who is gay, now lives in London. Early last year he reluctantly left his law firm, rented out his apartment and said goodbye to friends. After nearly seven years in the United States on legal but temporary visas, his partner had not been able to obtain a visa as a permanent resident. The two were facing the possibility of permanent separation.

Americans with a foreign-born spouse of the opposite sex are able to get them resident visas, or green cards, with relative ease. But federal law does not allow Americans to petition for green cards for same-sex spouses or partners. Eventually, they face a choice of remaining in the country with the immigrant here illegally or leaving the United States.

“Ultimately, we resolved that staying together was the most important thing for us,” Mr. Perlberg said. “And the only way to guarantee that we got to stay together was by making this move.”

Mr. Perlberg is part of a diaspora of gay Americans who have found they had to uproot and leave the country to continue to live with foreign partners. And this year, binational gay couples like his are a new — and controversial — focus of the debate in Washington on an ambitious overhaul of immigration laws. In a blueprint that President Obama presented last month, he pledged to give citizens, and also immigrants who are legal residents, the ability to petition for a green card for a same-sex foreign partner, if they can show they have “a permanent relationship.”

The Supreme Court will also take up same-sex issues this year, with hearings in March on two cases that challenge the definition of marriage as being a union between only a man and a woman. One case deals directly with a 1996 statute, the Defense of Marriage Act, that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage and governs the exclusion of gay couples from visas and other immigration benefits.

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France: Children born via surrogates overseas to be granted citizenship

04 February 2013

By James Brooks

Appeared in BioNews 691

The French Justice Minister’s instruction to courts to accept citizenship applications for children born via surrogates in other countries has unleashed a political and popular furore.

The minister, Christiane Taubira, issued the instruction during a debate on gay marriage. Immediately, ministers from the opposition UMP party accused the government of attempting to underhandedly introduce liberal legislation on surrogacy and access to IVF for gay couples. Surrogacy is illegal in France and fertility treatment only available to heterosexual couples.

After Taubira had presented the instruction to the French parliament, the head of the opposition UMP party, Jean-François Copé, declared that the government had ‘let its mask drop’ and that the instruction should immediately be withdrawn.

UMP MP Laurent Wauquiez, who leads a movement calling for a popular referendum on gay marriage, told a full French parliament that ‘the law being presented is the start rather than the finish line and test-tube babies and surrogate mothers are the destination’.

According to the Associated Press, the debate ‘has sent thousands into the streets, turned the bridges over the Seine into billboards and prompted charges that women’s bodies will soon be for rent in a society that still has surprisingly deep conservative roots’.

Faced with such vociferous opposition, both Taubira and President François Hollande have sought to clarify their position. Talking to the press after a cabinet meeting, Taubira said: ‘There isn’t the slightest change in the position of either the President or the government. In law surrogacy is forbidden – there is no debate on that point’.

In fact the instruction concerns only children who are born via surrogacy overseas and ensures that they will be given French civil status – similar to nationality – when they arrive in France.

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in In the News / Legal / Parenting / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

India Bars Gay Couples From Surrogacy Services

BY Trudy Ring – the Advocate

January 18 2013

India, which has been a popular destination for gay would-be parents seeking surrogacy services, will be so no more, with new regulations barring foreign same-sex couples and single people from entering into surrogacy arrangements there.

The new rules, posted on the Indian Home Ministry’s website, “say foreign couples seeking to enter into a surrogacy arrangement in India must be a ‘man and woman [who] are duly married and the marriage should be sustained at least two years,’” Agence France-Presse reports. Some proponents of the move said they were concerned about exploitation of impoverished young Indian women by affluent foreigners. India legalized commercial surrogacy in 2002.

Several fertility specialists and activists, meanwhile, decried the new regulations. “This is a huge heartbreak for homosexual couples and singles,” fertility doctor Anoop Gupta told AFP. Gay rights advocate Nitin Karani added, “It’s totally unfair — not only for gay people but for people who are not married who may have been living together for years, and for singles.”

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NJ Court’s Split Decision Provides Little Clarity on Surrogacy

October 24, 2012
New York Times By

Unable to conceive, the New Jersey couple did what an increasing number of 21st-century parents have done: they got an egg from an anonymous donor, and made an agreement with another woman to carry the child for them.

And knowing that there are any number of ways that having a child by surrogate can end in heartache, they tried to protect against it. They had the surrogate legally renounce her right to the child, and had a judge pre-emptively order that their names appear on the birth certificate.

But for all their efforts, their case has become an object lesson in how much modern babymaking has outpaced the law, leaving even the most careful would-be parents relying on little more than crossed fingers.

On Wednesday the New Jersey Supreme Court deadlocked over how to handle the wife’s plea to be named the mother of the child that she and her husband are raising, ending a lengthy legal battle while providing little new clarity. The state had sued, successfully, to strip the wife’s name from the birth certificate. The couple argued this was discrimination: State law automatically makes an infertile husband the father if his wife uses a sperm donor, so why should the same presumption not apply to an infertile wife? An appeals court disagreed with that distinction, siding with state officials who argued adoption was the only option for a mother with no genetic connection to a child.

The court’s split had the effect of affirming the appellate court’s ruling and leaving the child, now 3, legally motherless. It also neatly captured the continued uncertainty across the country, 25 years after New Jersey was at the center of what remains the best-known surrogate custody dispute, over a child known as Baby M.

Three justices agreed with the couple that the law should not treat infertile women differently from infertile men. Three others argued that allowing women who hire surrogates to bypass adoption would give special privileges to those who can afford expensive reproductive technologies.

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Kentucky Appeals Court reverses trial court ruling against lesbian mother

Beyoned (Straight and Gay ) Marriage by Nancy Polikoff – October 19, 2012

It still happens today.  Lesbian mothers lose custody of their children to their ex-husbands because they are lesbian.  Hard to believe, in this era when conservatives often support civil unions — just not marriage — for same-sex couples.  But it’s true.
And that’s what happened to Angela Maxwell and her three children earlier this year when a Hardin County, Kentucky judge awarded sole custody to the children’s father, Robert. The judge also limited Angela’s time with the children and said neither parent could live with a nonmarital partner while the children were with that parent. For more than a year before the trial, the children who were about 14, 12, and 6, had been alternating weeks between the two parents.  That temporary arrangement included a prohibition on unrelated guests spending the night when the children were there, so it appears that Angela was not living with her same-sex partner, Angel.  At the custody trial, Angela asked that the joint custody continue and that the overnight restriction be lifted.
The trial judge was not subtle about the reason he awarded sole custody to Robert.  “The [mother] is seeking to live an unconventional life-style that has not been fully embraced by society at large,” the judge ruled, “regardless of whether or not same-sex relationships should or should not be considered sexual misconduct.  Like it or not, this decision will impact her children in ways that she may not fully have considered and most will be unfavorable.”

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Alabama appeals court denies Mobile woman right to adopt partner’s son

By Brendan Kirby – October 12, 2012 – AL.com

MOBILE, Alabama –€“ Cari Searcy considers herself the parent of 6-year-old Khaya in every important way, but an Alabama appeals court ruled today that legally, she is not.

The Alabama Court of Civil Appeals upheld a decision by Mobile County Probate Judge Don Davis to deny Searcy’s adoption petition. Although she has been with her partner, Kim McKeand, for 14 years – and legally married her in California in 2008 – the court ruled unanimously that Alabama law does not recognize same-sex unions.

“Of course, I was disappointed, but I guess we were kind of expecting it,” Searcy said this evening. “But you always hope for the best.”

Searcy said she and McKeand have discussed appealing the ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court or, perhaps, taking the case to federal court. But she said she has made no decisions.

Searcy’s lawyer, Vivian Beckerle, said the cost of an appeal is one of the factors her client will have to consider.

“It does begin to get expensive to carry it forward,” she said. “I’d like to see them do it, because it is something the state needs to confront head-on.”

This is the second time Searcy has tried to adopt the child. Davis denied an earlier petition in 2006, ruling that the adoption was not permissible because Searcy and McKeand were not married.

Contest paid for marriage trip to California

In 2008, the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau held a contest asking same-sex couples from other states to write about why they wanted to get married. Searcy, who owns a video production company, said she made a YouTube video chronicling her story and won a trip to the Golden State in September of that year.

Searcy also has told her story on a documentary entitled, “I am a Parent.”

After California voters made same-sex marriage illegal again in a hotly contested referendum, Searcy said, she and McKeand waited to see how the courts would treat marriages that occurred before the vote. Ultimately, the California Supreme Court ruled that those marriages would stand.

In Mobile, valid marriage license in hand, Searcy again petitioned to adopt Khaya.

“We’re not asking for the state to legally marry us,” she said. “I’m just asking for the right to legally adopt our son so I can make medical decisions for him, educational decisions, the normal parental things.”

It is not merely a theoretical exercise.

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in Adoption / In the News / Legal / Second Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments