McDonnell weighs proposal that would allow gays to adopt

By Anita Kumar, Monday, April , 8:38 PM Washington Post

RICHMOND — Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is considering whether to try to derail proposed regulations developed by his Democratic predecessor that would for the first time allow gay couples to adopt children in Virginia.

McDonnell has less than two weeks to act on the regulations that would force state-licensed private and church-run agencies to allow unmarried couples — heterosexual or homosexual — to adopt children.

Conservatives, including Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), are lobbying McDonnell to ask the State Board of Social Services to kill the proposal because they do not think it is healthy for gay couples to raise children.

Marshall said that he considers the change part of a “radical anti-family proposal” and that he does not even think single people should adopt, which is currently allowed by law. “Children need a mother and a father,” he said.

Eric Finkbeiner, McDonnell’s policy director, said that the governor was considering his options but in general “supports and encourages” adoption of children by married couples and single parents.

McDonnell alienated gay rights activists shortly after taking office when he excluded sexual orientation from an executive order that barred discrimination in the state workforce, a break in tradition from his Democratic predecessors.

Later, when Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II advised the state’s public colleges to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, McDonnell further angered gay rights activists when, in an attempt to quell the matter, he issued a nonbinding “executive directive” prohibiting discrimination in the state workforce, including on the basis of sexual orientation.

McDonnell must make his recommendation to the State Board of Social Services, a nine-member panel in which all but four members are holdovers from his Democratic predecessor, by April 16.

The social services board has spent more than a year working on developing regulations. It received more than 1,000 responses during a public comment period, which ended Friday.

If the board approves a significantly changed regulation, 25 people could ask that the public comment period be reopened and implementation be delayed.

Kaine, who is expected to run for U.S. Senate next year, proposed the change to the regulations in November 2009, less than two months before he left the office to become the full-time chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Currently, only married couple and single men and women — regardless of sexual orientation — can adopt in Virginia. The proposal, according to the governor’s office, would mandate that gay singles and unmarried couples be able to access faith-based groups, such as Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services, to adopt children.

Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, general counsel to Equality Virginia and a former chief deputy attorney general, disputed that the proposed regulations would not allow unmarried couples to adopt. “They’re trying to create problems where none exist,” she said.

Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, said she contacted the governor’s office and is confident that the administration plans to recommend the removal of the language.

Cobb said her organization, which is against gay couples adopting children, opposes the regulations more strongly on the basis of religious freedom. She said private adoption agencies deserve to have the ability to screen prospective parents based on the agency’s beliefs.

Jeff Caruso, executive director of the Virginia Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic dioceses, said his organization also opposes the new regulations on the basis of religious freedom.

“Faith-based agencies have certain deeply held convictions,” he said. He said it’s important to preserve freedom of conscience.

Marshall said he notified the governor’s office last week when he first heard about the proposal. Finkbeiner said the administration has known about the regulations for the past year but waited to act because the governor generally weighs in after the public comment ends.

Marshall said he also asked Cuccinelli for an opinion on the matter Friday but had not heard back.

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

Arkansas court skeptical of reasons for banning unmarried couples from adopting or fostering children

Thursday, March 17, 2011 – Nancy Polikoff –
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage

It’s always risky to predict the outcome of a case based on oral argument. Nonetheless, I’ll predict that the Arkansas Supreme Court will affirm the decision of a trial judge in Cole v. Arkansas Dept. of Human Services that the state’s ban on adoption and fostering by anyone living with a nonmarital partner violates the state’s constitution. The ban was enacted by voters in 2008. You can watch the argument on the court’s website here. Although a lawyer for the state did argue briefly, the lawyer who primarily argued for upholding the ban represented the intervenors, the Family Council Action Committee, the Arkansas group behind placing the matter on the ballot in 2008. The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU, which has once again done a top notch job.

Before the US Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that its criminal prohibition on private consensual sex in the home violated the state’s constitution. The importance of that case, Jegley v. Picado, played a large role in today’s hearing. The trial court found the ban a violation of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights as articulated in Jegley. The appellants disagree, arguing that the ban is nothing like the intrusion of criminalizing behavior in the home. The justices did not appear to buy it. They repeatedly returned to the fundamental right articulated in Jegley and expressed skepticism that the ban was anything but a direct and substantial burden on the exercise of that right.

If the ban violates the fundamental right of the plaintiffs then it cannot stand unless it is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest. But if there is no fundamental right at stake, then the ban survives as long as it has a “rational basis.” The intervenors and the state argued that the rational basis test allows the generalization that, as a group, the homes of “cohabiting” couples are less stable and more volatile than other homes, and that therefore an individual review of each applicant in such a situation is not required, even though some of those homes would be suitable.

When one of the justices asked the lawyer for the intervenors if he conceded he would lose if the court applied “heightened scrutiny,” he said no. He said the “life” of the child was at stake (that’s how he characterized the state’s interest on several occasions) and that the state couldn’t be required to place children in the “riskiest” and “poorest performing” home environments.

In what was perhaps the most astonishing part of the argument by the appellants, both lawyers asserted that the state’s screening process is not good enough to weed out unsuitable applicants. They called the process “imperfect” and “not foolproof” and said that mistakes are made. When one of the justices responded that the lawyer for the agency was acknowledging his system to be a failure, the lawyer said the Department of Human Services was doing the best it could but that people lie and “slip through” their process. He later backpedaled and said he had misspoken, but in the process he asserted the problem was everywhere and that caseworkers are overworked and the agency does not have sufficient funding.

So this is what it’s come to. There is no response to the assertion of the plaintiffs, echoed by judges on the court, that no one is allowed to foster or adopt a child without first going through an agency or judicial approval process. So apparently to justify excluding an entire category of applicants from the opportunity to show that a placement in their home is in the best interest of a child, the government lawyer must argue that his agency is not capable of doing its job properly. I find it impossible to imagine that the Arkansas Supreme Court will base its decision on such reasoning.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs reiterated the individual process each applicant goes through. He said that any studies about groups of children are irrelevant because of that, but he did further argue that whatever correlation there may be between “cohabitation” and child outcome does not demonstrate that the cohabitation causes the problems. He also told that court that it could not rule against the gay and lesbian plaintiffs without overruling the court’s decision in Howard. In that case a unanimous court struck down an administrative regulation preventing a gay person or anyone living with a gay person from being licensed as a foster parent. The authors of both the majority and concurring opinions in Howard remain on the bench.

One of the court’s newest justices, Courtney Hudson Henry, asked the lawyer for the intervenors the last question of the argument. She noted that a gay person living alone with multiple sexual partners is eligible to adopt, as long as that person doesn’t live with a partner. (I wish she has left the qualifier “gay” off her statement, as it is true for a heterosexual with multiple partners as well). The response she received was that the ban is concerned with the dynamics and volatility of cohabiting relationships and break ups and there are a variety of reasons an individual might be denied the ability to adopt or be a foster parent.

And so it has come to this. The same state that cannot be trusted be weed out cohabiting couples whose homes are not good for children can be trusted to weed out single applicants who sleep around (without having police go snooping in their homes, which everyone agrees Jegley does not allow). Of course, that’s not the point. In fact, the point of the ban has nothing to do with children and everything to do with stigmatizing both same-sex and unmarried different-sex relationships. I don’t think the Arkansas Supreme Court is buying it.

in Adoption / Foster Care / Foster Parenting / In the News / Legal  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Couple Lose Foster Care Right Over Anti-Gay Stance

February 28, 2011
New york Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 1:35 p.m. EST

LONDON (AP) — A British court has ruled that a Christian couple cannot care for foster children because they disapprove of homosexuality.

Judges at London’s Royal Courts of Justice ruled that laws protecting gays from discrimination take precedence over the couple’s religious beliefs.

Eunice and Owen Johns, aged 62 and 65-years old, had previously fostered children in the 1990s, but what one social worker described as their “strong views” on homosexuality raised red flags with authorities in the English city of Derby when they were interviewed in 2007.

Eunice Johns said Monday that she was “extremely distressed” by the decision, which Christian groups also condemned.

But the judges ruled that Britain was “a secular state, not a theocracy.”

in Foster Care / In the News  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Panel Finds Canadian Gay Marriage Valid in Probate Case

Noeleen G. Walder February 25, 2011 – New York Law Journal

A state appeals court has cleared the way for a same-sex spouse to inherit the estate of his deceased partner.
The Appellate Division, First Department, held yesterday in Matter of the Estate of H. Kenneth Ranftle, 4214, that recognizing the marriage in Canada of H. Kenneth Ranftle and J. Craig Leiby, who was designated as Mr. Ranftle’s “surviving spouse and sole distributee,” did not violate public policy.
“[T]he Legislature’s failure to authorize same-sex couples to enter into marriage in New York or require recognition of validly performed out-of-state same-sex marriages, cannot serve as an expression of public policy for the State,” the unanimous panel wrote in an unsigned ruling.
The decision came the day after the Obama administration announced that it would no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman for federal law purposes.
Susan L. Sommer, who represented Mr. Leiby, said the Ranftle decision is significant because it marks the first time the First Department has ruled on the validity of same-sex marriage.
The ruling also means that in questions of inheritance, “private parties and competing family members will make no headway” if they claim a same-sex marriage is invalid, said Ms. Sommer, who serves as legal director of constitutional litigation at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Messrs. Ranftle and Leiby married in Quebec in June 2008. Mr. Ranftle died five months later.
In his will, he gave each of his three brothers some $30,000. He left the remainder of his estate to Mr. Leiby, who was also designated executor.
Mr. Leiby subsequently filed a petition for probate, in which he named himself as the surviving spouse and only distributee of the estate.
After the probate was granted in December 2008, one of Mr. Ranftle brothers moved to vacate the order. In 2009, Manhattan Surrogate Kristen Booth Glen ruled that Mr. Ranftle’s three siblings were not entitled to notification of the probate proceedings under Surrogate’s Court Procedure Act §1403(1)(a).
She cited the Feb. 1, 2008, decision of Martinez v. County of Monroe, 50 AD3d 189, in which the Fourth Department ordered Monroe County to extend health insurance coverage to the same-sex spouse of a female community college employee.
The Court of Appeals has ruled that same-sex marriage is not valid if contracted in New York. At the same time, however, the Court has held that the state should recognize marriages in foreign countries and other states where such unions are legal (NYLJ, Jan. 23, 2009).
Former Governor David A. Paterson also has instructed state agencies to recognize such marriages. However, the Legislature has not addressed the issue.

On appeal, Mr. Ranftle’s brother argued that Surrogate Glen’s decision “ignored the legislature’s clear definitions and directives.” He accused the surrogate of acting “according to her own political/personal predilections.”
“[R]ecognizing same sex marriages is a fundamental social change that cannot occur in the absence of legislative authority,” he wrote in his brief.
Mr. Leiby countered that the case called for “adherence to one of the most enduring principles of New York common law—that out-of-state marriages valid where entered are honored in New York even if those marriages could not have been obtained under our State’s laws.”
Under the marriage rule, New York has long recognized out-of-state marriages unless they expressly run afoul of state laws or are repugnant to public policy.
In an amicus brief backing Mr. Leiby, the state Attorney General’s Office said that in order to fall under the exception of the marriage recognition rule, the “Legislature must do more than prohibit the performance of the marriage in New York—it must also explicitly prohibit the recognition of the marriage validly performed in another State or Country.”
The First Department agreed.
“Same-sex marriage does not fall within either of the two exceptions to the marriage recognition rule,” the panel wrote. “In the absence of an express statutory prohibition legislative action or inaction does not qualify as an exception to the marriage recognition rule.”
Justices Angela M. Mazzarelli, James M. Catterson, Sallie Mazanet-Daniels and Nelson S. Roman sat on the panel, which heard arguments on Jan. 19.
Alexander M. Dudelson, a solo practitioner in Brooklyn, represented Mr. Ranftle’s brother, Richard.
“While I am pleased with the end result that New York will recognize same-sex marriages from other jurisdictions, I believe that this is a matter delegated to the Legislature rather than the Judiciary,” Mr. Dudelson wrote in an e-mail.
In addition to Ms. Sommer, Natalie M. Chin of Lambda Legal and Erica Bell of Weiss, Buell & Bell represented Mr. Leiby.

in In the News / Legal  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Rules on Cameras in Delivery Rooms Stir Passions

February 2, 2011
New york Times

CASCADE, Md. — When Laurie Shifler was expecting her eighth child, she was so upset about a local hospital’s new policy restricting photographs of births that she started an online petition. Hundreds of people, near and far, signed it, many expressing outrage that a hospital would prevent parents from recording such a momentous occasion, one that could never be recaptured.

The hospital, Meritus Medical Center, in nearby Hagerstown, bars all pictures and videos during birth — cellphones and cameras must be turned off — and allows picture-taking to begin only after the medical team has given permission.

“It’s about our rights,” Ms. Shifler, 36, said the other day at her home here in rural Maryland as she cradled her newborn daughter, Kaelii, in her arms and the rest of her brood roughhoused around her. Her husband, Michael, 37, a police officer, was able to take pictures 30 seconds after Kaelii’s birth last month, but Ms. Shifler is still fighting the hospital to change its policy.

“It’s my child,” she said. “Who can tell me I can take a picture or not take a picture of my own flesh and blood?”

For the hospital, the issue is not about “rights” but about the health and safety of the baby and mother and about protecting the privacy of the medical staff, many of whom have no desire to become instant celebrities on Facebook or YouTube.

Their concerns take place against a backdrop of medical malpractice suits in which video is playing a role. A typical case is one settled in 2007 that involved a baby born at the University of Illinois Hospital with shoulder complications and permanent injury; video taken by the father in the delivery room showed the nurse-midwife using excessive force and led to a payment to the family of $2.3 million.

Nationwide, photography and videography have been allowed in many delivery rooms for decades. But in recent years, technology creep has forced some hospitals to rethink their policies as they seek to balance safety and legal protection with the desire by some new mothers to document all aspects of their lives, including the entire birth process.

“Hospitals are struggling with it,” said Dr. Joanne Conroy, chief health care officer for the Association of American Medical Colleges. “Cellphones have exponentially increased the ability to take a picture — a high-quality picture — in a hospital setting.”

Mike Matray, editor of The Medical Liability Monitor, a newsletter based in Chicago, said the issue had been moving up on hospital agendas.

“I have certainly heard this issue discussed more often than I ever have previously,” he said. “And it’s certainly true that some risk managers in hospitals are advising doctors to stop allowing video in the delivery room.”

There are no national standards regarding cameras in the delivery room, so each hospital sets its own rules, creating a patchwork of policies. No national organization, including the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the American Hospital Association, keeps track of how many hospitals allow photography, so it is hard to tell whether restrictions are on the rise.

Many hospitals allow and even encourage recording because modern cameras, particularly those taking video, are so unobtrusive. But that same technology has introduced a wild card into a fraught scene that could shock a jury — with the mother screaming and staff responding (or not) to what may look like an emergency — all of which can be edited to misrepresent what actually took place.

The restrictions at Meritus went into effect in November, after the hospital began reviewing all of its policies because it was moving to a new facility and learned that six other hospitals in the region had barred photography and videography during births. Georgetown University Hospital in Washington has a similar policy.

“Deliveries are complicated,” Dr. William C. Hamilton, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Meritus, said in an interview at the hospital, adding that no one wanted to be distracted. “I’m not a baseball catcher with a mitt, just catching a baby,” he said.

Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston also bans cameras during births, said Dr. Erin E. Tracy, an obstetrician there who also teaches at Harvard Medical School.

“When we had people videotaping, it got to be a bit of a media circus,” Dr. Tracy said, adding that the banning of cameras evolved through general practice rather than a written policy. “I want to be 100 percent focused on the medical care, and in this litigious atmosphere, where ads are on TV every 30 seconds about suing, it makes physicians gun shy.”

But many other hospitals are taking the opposite approach and accommodating families (except during Caesareans or if complications arise). St. Luke’s Hospital in Boise, Idaho, which serves a large military population, even uses Skype to connect mothers with soldier-fathers overseas. Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, began allowing photography and videography of births in 2008.

“Our hope is that the family will film it and it will lead to a closer bonding and a feeling of joy and success,” said Dr. Robert Barbieri, chairman of Brigham’s department of obstetrics and gynecology. He said the mother and clinicians must agree to be filmed and the photographer must use a hand-held camera with an internal light so equipment is not in the way.

“We’re trying to be as transparent as we can,” Dr. Barbieri said. “If something goes wrong, we try to explain immediately what happened. A video is not inconsistent with the goal of trying to be transparent.”

Dr. Elliott Main, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, which also allows filming of births, said, “The modern approach is not to ban cameras but to do drills and practice.”

“Where you get into trouble is where people panic or don’t know what to do next and have blank looks on their faces,” he said. Videotaping simulated births, he said, can help the medical staff adjust their behavior.

Obstetricians are sued more often than doctors in other specialties and pay among the highest insurance premiums. They can also be more wary than other doctors, whose every move is not recorded.

Video is a particular worry because it picks up actions that a still camera might not catch and the sound can make a situation seem worse than it is.

“The first consideration for a trial attorney is how this plays to a jury,” said Paul Myre, a lawyer in St. Louis who has defended doctors and hospitals in malpractice cases for 25 years.

In one case in which he was involved, a man on the jury fainted when a simple instructional video of a birth was shown. “Just a normal childbirth can look fairly traumatic to a lay person,” Mr. Myre said. He said he defended a doctor in another case in which the video showed that his client “had done everything right,” but the jury still felt “the child needed to be taken care of.”

In a case in which the audio was crucial, mentioned in a 1998 article in the Journal of Family Practice, a father’s recording picked up complaints by nurses that a doctor would not get off the phone to attend to a delivery. It also picked up warning signals from the fetal monitor. Another time, a father taped a complicated delivery and then pretended to be congratulating the staff while recording their responses about the complications, which were later used as evidence against them.

Matthew Dudley, the lawyer who won the $2.3 million settlement in Illinois, said that without the video, he probably would not have won the settlement. He also said that without video, some trial lawyers were less willing to take a case, adding to the reasons for hospitals to ban it. At Meritus, Dr. Hamilton said no particular incident had prompted the new restrictions, adding that the threat of lawsuits was not new.

“I openly admit to my co-workers that I practice defensive medicine,” he said. But he said he “takes offense” that “now I have to be videoed to prove that I’m providing good care.”

Aggravating the situation at Meritus, which prides itself on its new family-friendly obstetrics unit, were statements from officials last month that families had to wait five minutes before taking pictures. Dr. Hamilton said that those statements resulted from “miscommunications” and that “there is no five-minute rule.”

Brittany Saunders, 17, who was sitting upright in her hospital bed at Meritus recently with her newborn daughter, Meliyah, said her mother was able to take video within a couple of minutes of birth. (Ms. Saunders had not seen it yet because her mother “ran off with the phone too quick.”)

Still, Ms. Saunders was disappointed not to have video of the actual birth because her friends had posted their deliveries online and she wanted to do the same.

But some mothers who think they want the whole experience recorded change their minds. Robin Dobbe, 27, was angry when she first learned about the Meritus policy (“It’s my body”), and she signed the petition.

But once she was giving birth to her son, Charlie, she wanted her mother by her side, not taking pictures. Her mother was allowed to start shooting within 30 seconds.

“I look like a complete mess,” Ms. Dobbe said. “I wasn’t decent for Facebook.”

She said she now supported the policy, was glad the staff was focused on the task at hand and that she would never forget the experience.

Andrew Keh contributed reporting from New York.

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

Federal Court to Re-Hear Same-Sex Couple’s Challenge After Louisiana Refuses to Respect Out-of-State Adoptions

 Lambda Legal, January 14, 2011

Five-year-old son raised by two fathers still without accurate birth certificate.

(New Orleans, January 14, 2011) – The full 16-member U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, regarding the New York adoption of a Louisiana-born baby boy by a same-sex couple.

Lambda Legal represents Oren Adar and Mickey Smith in their case against Louisiana State Registrar Darlene Smith. Adar and Smith are a gay couple who adopted their Louisiana-born son in 2006 in New York, where a judge issued an adoption decree. When the couple attempted to get a new birth certificate for their child, in part so Smith could add his son to his health insurance, the registrar’s office told him that Louisiana does not recognize adoption by unmarried parents and so could not issue it.

Lambda Legal filed suit on behalf of Adar and Smith in October 2007, saying that the registrar was violating the Full Faith and Credit Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by refusing to recognize the New York adoption judgment because the child’s parents are unmarried.  The Constitution requires that judgments and orders issued by a court in one state be legally binding in other states. Further, a state may not disadvantage some children over others simply because the child’s parents are unmarried. The Louisiana attorney general disagreed, and advised the registrar that she did not have to honor an adoption from another state that would not have been granted under Louisiana law had the couple lived and adopted there. In 2009, U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey ruled against the registrar and issued a summary judgment ordering her to issue a new birth certificate identifying both Oren Adar and Mickey Smith as the boy’s parents, saying her continued failure to do so violated the U.S. Constitution. In 2010, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and affirmed the judgment. The attorney general requested a rehearing by the full Court of Appeals, which was granted.

WHO:          Kenneth Upton Jr., Supervising Senior Staff Attorney for Lambda Legal

WHAT:        Oral Arguments, Adar v. Smith

WHERE:          John Minor Wisdom U.S. Court of Appeals Building
                600 Camp St.
                New Orleans, Louisiana

WHEN:        Wednesday, January 19, 2011
                9:00 a.m.

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

Supreme Court lets stand New York ruling for Debra H.

Beyond Gay and Straight Marriage – Nancy Polikoff – January 11, 2011
I wrote extensively about the dreadful New York Court of Appeals decision last year that refused to recognize parentage of a nonbio mom based on the couple’s creation of a two-parent family. That court did, however, find that Debra H. was the parent of the child born to Janice R. because the couple was in a Vermont civil union when the child was born. The fact that a child in New York has two parents if the couple is married or in a civil union but otherwise has one parent, no matter how much that couple planned for and raised the child together, was a major impetus for the conference I’m hosting in March on the “New Illegitimacy.”

Anyway, Janice asked the US Supreme Court to hear her case, claiming that granting parental status to her civil union partner violated her Constitutional right to raise her biological child. Yesterday, the Court denied her petition. That’s what I expected. The Court hears very few cases at all, and very few specifically in the area of family law, which is generally a matter of state law and varies so much from state to state. Other nonbio moms have also been turned away when they’ve asked the Court to hear their cases. Refusing to hear a case — which is called a denial of certiorari in legal-speak — has no legal significance. In other words, it doesn’t add anything to the New York ruling or make it more meaningful in any way. It just leaves it alone.

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

LGBT Parenting Roundup

Mombian – January 4, 2011

I’m still recovering from the holidays, so let’s be different and start with some celebrity news before diving into politics:

Celebrity News

  • Elton John and his partner David Furnish are now proud parents. “Elton John and David Furnish became first-time fathers on Christmas after welcoming a baby boy via a surrogate,” says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Just once, though, I want to see a newspaper headline say, “[Male celebrity] and [Female celebrity] welcomed their new baby via sexual intercourse.”Much coverage of the new dads has also mentioned that John is listed as “Father” and Furnish as “Mother” on the child’s birth certificate, as if that somehow explained their parental roles. Fact is, of course, it may or may not coincide with their roles—but they might just have filled them out at random, as the forms clearly haven’t caught up with the reality of families today. “Parent” and “Parent” really isn’t that hard, folks.
  • Meanwhile, Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka spoke with People about raising their twins (and After Elton has a copy of the adorable photo spread).
  • Jane Lynch, lesbian mom and Glee actor, and Dan Savage, gay dad and “It Gets Better” campaign founder, talk with Newsweek about gay rights and being parents.

International News

  • Eleven-year-old Aspen Drewitt-Barlow, son of the first gay couple in Britain to have a baby via surrogate, has a sweet piece in the Mirror about life with his two dads. In a separate story, his parents are planning to set up a surrogacy center focused on same-sex couples.
  • The U.K.’s Guardian newspaper profiles four lesbian couples with children.
  • Since the U.K. changed its law requiring fertility clinics to consider a child’s “need for a father” before providing services, the number of lesbian couples seeking in vitro fertilization (IVF) has doubled, and the number of single women has tripled. The number using donor insemination at registered clinics has stayed about the same.
  • In Argentina, a baby girl was registered with the last names of both her biological and non-biological mothers, as the first child of a legally married lesbian couple in the country.
  • A gay couple in Johannesburg, South Africa gay has won a seven-year-battle for permission to have a child via a surrogate.
  • On a similar note, the Jerusalem Family Court ruled that a baby born to a surrogate may be adopted by the biological father’s partner.
  • Volker Kauder, the parliamentary leader of Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats, said same-sex couples have no right to have children.

U.S. Politics and Law

  • I’ve done an in-depth piece for Keen News Service on the recent awful North Carolina Supreme Court ruling that has jeopardized all existing second-parent adoptions in the state.
  • From the Dallas Voice, via Pam’s House Blend, comes the tragic news of lesbian mom Debie Hackett who died by suicide after losing a custody lawsuit with her former partner. As Pam points out, “It’s hard to pinpoint any one cause other than a person in crisis didn’t get the help she needed in time,” but the stress of the custody battle likely did not help her emotional state. I’ll take a cue from the Dallas Voice and provide a link here to the LGBT-friendly American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s Warning Signs for Suicide.
in In the News / Legislation / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Politicians refuse to act after churches win right to discriminate against gay foster parents

The Australian – December 27, 2010

BOTH the NSW government and opposition have ruled out any changes to the state’s anti-discrimination laws in the wake of a ruling that charities could bar gay couples as foster carers on religious grounds. In a decision that will open the way for other religious charities to refuse gay couples access to their services, the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal ruled that Wesley Mission’s foster care arm, Wesley Dalmar Services, had proved an exemption under the NSW Anti-Discrimination Act allowing it to discriminate against homosexual couples, reported The Australian. Wesley Mission, part of the Uniting Church assembly, argued that providing foster care services to gay couples would put at risk its financial and volunteer assistance from members of the mission who adhered to the doctrine that a monogamous heterosexual partnership was “the norm and ideal of the family”.

The decision overturned a ruling that ordered Wesley Mission to take steps to eliminate unlawful discrimination after refusing services to a gay couple.

NSW’s Anti-Discrimination Act – along with similar acts in most states – provides a series of exemptions for religious bodies. The exemptions apply specifically to the ordination and training of priests and ministers.

However, an extremely broad, non-specific exemption also applies to “any act or practice” of a religious body that conforms to that body’s doctrines.

The Administrative Decisions Tribunal described the ability of a religious group to prove an exemption to the act as “singularly undemanding” and noted that “this may be a matter which calls for the attention of parliament”.

However, a spokesman for NSW Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said yesterday that the legislation struck the right balance between protection from discrimination and the right to religious freedom.

“It is not envisaged that there will be changes to the current exemptions in relation to religious institutions,” the spokesman said.

NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell also ruled out yesterday any move to push for legislative change on the issue if the Liberals win government next March.

Religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws are also being tested in Victoria in an appeal before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which must decide whether it was lawful for the Christian Brethren to refuse to allow a gay youth suicide prevention group accommodation at the Christian Youth Camps’ Phillip Island Adventure Resort.

NSW passed laws earlier this year that allowed gay couples to legally adopt children, but allowed church adoption agencies the right to refuse to provide services to gay couples without breaching anti-discrimination laws.

in Foster Care / Foster Parenting / In the News  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

New Published Report Finds 0% of Adolescents Raised by Lesbians Have Been Physically or Sexually Abused by Parent

 

 

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

Los Angeles, CA – The Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation law and public policy at UCLA School of Law, announces new findings from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the longest-running study ever conducted on American lesbian families (now in its 24th year). In an article published today in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, the 17-year-old daughters and sons of lesbian mothers were asked about sexual abuse, sexual orientation, and sexual behavior. The paper finds that none of the 78 NLLFS adolescents report having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver. This contrasts with 26% of American adolescents who report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3% who report sexual abuse. According to the authors, “the absence of child abuse in lesbian mother families is particularly noteworthy, because victimization of children is pervasive and its consequences can be devastating. To the extent that our findings are replicated by other researchers, these reports from adolescents with lesbian mothers have implications for healthcare professionals, policymakers, social service agencies, and child protection experts who seek family models in which violence does not occur.” On sexual orientation, 2.8% of the NLLFS adolescents identified as predominantly to exclusively homosexual. The study was conducted by Nanette Gartrell, MD, Henny Bos, PhD (University of Amsterdam), and Naomi Goldberg, MPP (Williams Institute). Principal investigator Nanette Gartrell, MD, is a 2010 Williams Distinguished Scholar, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF, and affiliated with the University of Amsterdam. For more information about this study, please see Archives of Sexual Behavior: DOI 10.1007/s10508-010-9692-2 — Or, visit the NLLFS website at http://www.nllfs.org

 

 

The Williams Institute advances sexual orientation law and public policy through rigorous, independent research and scholarship, and disseminates it to judges, legislators, policymakers, media and the public. A national think tank at UCLA Law, the Williams Institute produces high quality research with real-world relevance. For more information go to: http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/home.html

View the full study at: http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/pdf/Gartrell-Bos-Goldberg-2010.pdf

in In the News / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments