The Republic of T.

I just finished listening to Andrew Koppelman, Yale law professor and author of the new book Same Sex, Different States: When Same-Sex Marriages Cross State Lines, on the Diane Rheme Show. I’ll definitely have to add his book to my (ever growing) “to read” list. He spent the segment talking about the various issues that crop up with gay couples, who are as mobile as anyone else in our culture, move from one state to another and end up throwing their legal rights and relationship into question.

With the likelihood that we’ll see a state-by-state approach favored for same-sex unions for the foreseeable future, we’ll also more frequently bump into an inevitable reality: the rights and protections we have in the states where we are married or “civil unionized” are not portable. Cross state lines and your spouse is no longer your spouse; something heterosexual couples don’t face, because they’re free to move about as they please without their rights and relationships being questioned. (And unmarried heterosexual couples always have the choice to get married, and can do so with relative ease in order to get the same rights and protections.)

And that means that as we continue committing to each other and creating families that occasionally cross state lines, we’re going to find ourselves in court, sorting out the inevitable confusion, in the Vermont/Virginia lesbian custody case I mentioned earlier, which has landed back in the headlines.

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I mentioned earlier that PFOX was distributing literature to students in our school district. Well, Timothy at Ex-Gay Watch has the skinny on the handout, which amounts to a list of websites proselytizing for a particular brand of Christianity.

The flier, though, is simply part of a larger effort to derail a gay-inclusive sex education curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland, where we now live, and where our kids will go to school. A curriculum introduced a year ago raised objections from a small group of right-wingers (none of whom appear to have kids in Montgomery County schools, as far as I can tell), and the current one is still raising objections; particularly the part entitled “Respect for Differences in Human Sexuality,” which discourages stereotyping and encourages empathy (asking students to consider the challenges LGBT students face, and put themselves in the other person’s position for a minute) and treating others with dignity and respect despite differences.

But I’m not going to address the entire story. Autumn at Ex-Gay Watch and Jim at the Vigilance blog do that far better than I can. I will, however, point out one thing that everyone should consider. This is a test case. Montgomery County is a very progressive area, and that’s why thus far we’ve been successful in fighting off this attempt by religious extremists to take control of our schools’ curriculum. They knew that when they first launched their campaign. They also know that if they can succeed here, they’ll have a much easier time in other school districts. Maybe yours.

What I want to address is one bit of insanity presented by NARTH, in support of the wingnuts. It’s also the basis for the question that’s the title of this post, and one I want to post to heterosexual readers of this blog.

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Parker and I had another one of those father-son chats that was cute enough to share.

We took Parker to a birthday party yesterday, and upon arrival all the parents and kids got name tags. After we got home last night, we settled in to watch Dragon Tales before getting ready for bedtime, and I noticed I was still wearing my name tag. Parker was sitting on my lap. The conversation when something like this:

ME: (Noticing my name tag still on my shirt) Oh, I guess I can take this off now.

PARKER: (Pointing at the name tag I’d just removed.) Is that your last name?

ME: No, that’s my first name.

PAKER: No it’s not.

ME: Oh really?

PARKER: Because I don’t see a “D” in there.

Not that I’m likely to forget, it’s good to be reminded that — whatever my friends, family, or colleagues call me — I am and will always and forever be known as “Parker’s Dad.” (And sometimes that title completely replaces my given name.)

For that, he got a big smile, a hug, and a kiss from Daddy.

It may be the height of lazy blogging, but here’s one more meme.

How evil are you?

I’m almost disappointed. I thought I’d turn out to be at least a little evil. (Maybe the problem is that I don’t often get caught at it…)

Sounds about right. Sorry for the dearth of posts here. I’ve just about given up trying to do much blogging on the weekends, and a four-day/holiday weekend is an even bigger blogging obstacle. So, I borrowed this meme from Pink Feminist Hellcat.

I’m also gearing up to my attempt to implement at “Getting Things Done”-type organizational scheme, in the hopes that doing so will alleviate some of the frustration and tension I’ve been having lately. Who knows? Getting even halfway organized might result in more time for other stuff, like blogging…

We’ll see.

C’mon. Admit it. You were a little turned on. Right?

Via Devoter.

I hate to say “I told you so” — especially in this case — but can we finally just admit this? It doesn’t fucking work. Can we go one step further and say that funding religious organizations to teach abstinence-only education and spread anti-condom propaganda in Africa is an act of genocide?

Remember a while back when I unpacked the rest of a post from Anderson Cooper’s blog, about a religious charity running a program in Africa for women with fistulas? Remember the rest of the story being the Bush administration’s suspension of funding for a UN program that served the same function, and leaving the door open for religious organizations to step in do do as they please. And how the faith-based organization featured in the post ran an HIV prevention program that focused on abstinence and little else?

Remember that the Bush administration has eliminated or weakened rules to protect the division of church and state, so that religious organizations can get federal money to “spread the gospel” on the taxpayers’ dime, while running health care operations that end up making treatment for serious diseases — like tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria — not just a matter of life and death, but a matter of faith as well? Remember that we’ve gone from funding the Great Society to funding the great commission?

Remember that I also included in that post mention of an HIV prevention educator who had the following experience while participating in a program in Uganda, run by a faith-based organization?

“Just remember, whatever you do, don’t mention condoms.”

I froze halfway inside the hot, dusty classroom in Kampala, Uganda. I turned to Crystal, the coordinator for ASK Africa, an initiative promoting HIV/AIDS awareness and education in Ugandan primary and secondary schools. I must have looked bewildered because she again made it clear that my impending speech about the ASK program could not include any shout-outs to the Trojan Man. Apparently the headmistress would be present, and as far as she is concerned, “safe sex” is an oxymoron.

…It’s bad enough that $1.3 billion has been spent domestically in the United States on these unproven and controversial abstinence-only programs, many of which are soiled with subliminal religious messages passed as scientific fact. But it’s criminal, even unpardonable, that we have forced our own policies on countries unable to deny them, undermining the potency of programs needing every resource at their disposal in their educational arsenal to adequately equip vulnerable populations against a virus that continues to purge their countries.

It gets worse as he goes on.

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This may not come as a surprise, coming from someone with ADD, but it occurred to me earlier this week that at least some of the frustration I’ve been feeling lately is due to poor time management, or possibly even a complete lack thereof. Like I said, not exactly a news flash. Neither is the reality that my time management skills have never been great. (Again, no need to alert the media here.) Next to my financial management skills (material for another post), it’s one of the biggest problems I’ve struggled with; especially in school and at work.

There have been times throughout my life when this deficiency has been cast in very stark and unflattering light; usually those times when circumstances overwhelm my ability to compensate for it. And there are, in all those periods, events that send me scurrying for some sort of time management information (TMI, for short), the way a man aboard a sinking ship looks for something, anything, with which to bail out the water that’s rushing in. (A bucket would be great, but a teaspoon will do if that’s all I can find. When my first job in D.C. was going down faster than the Titanic, and happened to be riding down in the elevator with the Executive Director, she asked me how I was it was going. I said “Like I’m bailing water on the Titanic with a teaspoon.”) Never mind looking for a lifejacket. That’s somewhere under all the water.

Now — when I’m facing the intersection of work and (a growing) family and blogging and any number of other activities that I might want to engage in — is one of those times. So I find myself reaching for another bucket to bail with, and some trepidation given my track record with this sort of thing (more below). But at this point might worship as a demigod the person who can show me how to get organized and stay organized — to find time to do all the stuff I have to do, and maybe a fair amount of the stuff I want to do — if it will loosen or even completely banish the knot of tension that tightly winds itself between my shoulder blades on a daily basis now.

So, here I go again. Earlier this week, I finally got desperate enough to go out and pick up a copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. I’m hoping to get though it during the long weekend.

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Not to spoil anyone’s appetite, but I found this picture here via this Alternet article, and had to share. If that’s who I think it is on the table — that is, if it’s who it looks like — I wouldn’t recommend him to the diners. My guess is he’s gonna be tough, stringy, and more than a little bitter.

Speaking of tough and bitter — again, not to ruin anyone’s appetite — the Alternet article offer a rather interesting look at turkeys from someone who developed a kind of bond with them, after meeting a few at an animal sanctuary and discovering alternatives to traditional Thanksgiving fare. There’s a video too, after the jump, but I’d recommend waiting until well after dinner to watch it.

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If you think I’m going to say what you think I’m going to say about Thanksgiving, well, I already did and it went over like a lead balloon. Boy, do people not what to hear about that stuff. Thankfully, this year other people are talking about that stuff.

Teacher Bill Morgan walks into his third-grade class wearing a black Pilgrim hat made of construction paper and begins snatching up pencils, backpacks and glue sticks from his pupils. He tells them the items now belong to him because he “discovered” them. The reaction is exactly what Morgan expects: The kids get angry and want their things back.

Morgan is among elementary school teachers who have ditched the traditional Thanksgiving lesson, in which children dress up like Indians and Pilgrims and act out a romanticized version of their first meetings.

Morgan said he still wants his pupils at Cleveland Elementary School in San Francisco to celebrate Thanksgiving. But “what I am trying to portray is a different point of view.”

Others see Morgan and teachers like him as too extreme.

“I think that is very sad,” said Janice Shaw Crouse, a former college dean and public high school teacher and now a spokeswoman for Concerned Women for America, a conservative organization. “He is teaching his students to hate their country. That is a very distorted view of history, a distorted view of Thanksgiving.”

You know, the stuff we’re not supposed to talk about today.

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I’ve been reading E.J. Graff’s What is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, which I highly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the history of marriage and how it’s evolved into its current form. Of course, Graff is tracing that history in order to argue in support of marriage equality for her relationship and for all same-sex couples, so some people will disregard it from the start. But those who read it will be intrigued by how Graff traces the changes marriage has gone through:

• how marriage changed when the western economy no longer depended on familial labor (and marriage was a means of knowing who your main co-worker and employees would be) and shifted to individual labor;
• how that shift also made marriage a matter of individual choice rather than an arrangement made by families in order to secure labor and/or property;
• how the Christian church shifted from rejecting marriage (yup, because the world was rotten and J.C. was gonna be back in a minute, dontcha know), to controlling marriage, to finally shifting it to state control;
• how the “purpose” shifted from being solely reproduction (as the economy shifted to ensure that large broods no longer meant guaranteed labor so much as guaranteed poverty) to include sex as purposeful beyond reproduction (i.e. to refresh, renew, and secure the intimate bond of the married couple), even moreso when the Protestant Reformation rejected celibacy;
• how the shift to an industrial economy sent men into the workplace and kept women (who had previously been co-workers of partners in business with their husbands) at home, thus creating the romanticized version of motherhood (and for the first time shifting child custody to the mother from the father);
• how the emancipation of women — in terms of being able to own property, get an education, decide when to have children (thanks to contraception) and earn a living — forever changed the institution of marriage as women had less incentive to get married in order to ensure room and board, and even less incentive to stay in marriages that had become unbearable;
• how the liberalizing of divorce laws (in the 1860s not the 1960s), evolved out of the idea that love was the primary reason individuals chose to marry (after all, what else was left?);

I could go on and on, and I’m oversimplifying the book already. But having gone through all of the above makes me want to ask a question of my readers here.

It’s the question in the title, of course. Why did you get married? Was it to have kids? If your heterosexual and married, why did you opt for a legally-sanctioned union? If you’re in a same-sex couple, why did you get married given the lack of a legally recognized status (unless your in a state that recognizes same-sex marriages or civil unions)? Would you get legally-married if you had the option? I’ll have my own answers later, but I’m interested in hearing from others.

In the meantime, my reading on marriage isn’t quite done yet. Next on the list is Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz.

I don’t write much about being an adult with ADD anymore.It’s something I’ve written about before, though it’s been a long time, and it’s something that seems to be a recurring theme in my life; one that’s cropping up again. Maybe it’s because I’m getting a head start on something. I’m going to be 38 in February. And while 38 isn’t 40, I can see it from there. That combined with other factors in my life, including the reality that my life will soon change again with the growth of our family, has me re-evaluating some things. Old feelings that haven’t come up in a while are bubbling to the surface.

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I know I’m not supposed to talk about it, but I can’t help myself. I know we’re supposed to be portraying the election results as a progressive victory, and I’m as happy as the next person to see the Republican majority come to an end. But we’re being less than honest here if we pretend that we’re not seeing at least a subtle shift in the Democratic party and/or a redefining of what is and isn’t a progressive issue.

And, as was telegraphed all along the road to the 2006 elections, the first issue to go overboard was same-sex marriage. The newly-elected Dems are a mixed bag at best.

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While searching the Queer Resources Directory for the Queer Songs List (soon to become a playlist on my iPod and maybe an iMix on iTunes) I compiled in college, I found this list of quotations that actually included a couple from me. Apparently, I wrote them in college, but I’d forgotten about them since then. The first one was apparently written before my first gay pride parade in Atlanta.

Not long ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about militancy. Since I’ve been labeled as “militant” from time to time, I thought long and hard about what it meant. Here’s what I found.

In a society that says to you at every turn “You are nothing,” it is militant to say “No. I am something.” This is the foundation of resistance; perhaps resistance in its simplest form, and is the beginning of affirming your life. I will be thinking of this, as I walk down Peachtree on Sunday, surrounded by 50,000+ of my sisters and brothers: that simply standing in the sun and being who I am is my act of resistance, and my act of joy.

– Terrance Heath

[On interacial dating:] If you’re happy, then let the rest of the world go merrily to Hell … there ain’t no guarantee you can get the same thing in another color.

– Terrance Heath

It’s kinda weird to be considered “quotable,” especially anything I wrote back then. But it’s interesting to see what I had to say so long ago…

This can’t be right.

It’s a cute bit of blog fun, but I have a feeling that if certain people entered their URLs, they’d ruin the curve for the rest of us. And, actually, after taking a look at the criteria for each level, I’m just a few incoming links away from getting busted back down to B-List, at the very least.

Cute, but not to be taken seriously if it’s likely you’ll be brought back down to earth, quickly.

The lesbian custody battle I mentioned earlier and blogged about back in in August is back in the news again. And it underscores just one more way in which our families, and as a result our children, are vulnerable due to a lack of legal recognition and the protections that go with it.

A Rutland Family Court judge will decide whether to penalize a Virginia woman who failed to comply with a child-custody ruling that grew out of the breakup of her civil union.

In August the Vermont Supreme Court rejected her argument and sent the case back to Family Court.

Last week, Vermont’s highest court turned down a request for a new hearing.

“(Lisa Miller-Jenkins’) motion for re-argument fails to identify points of law or fact overlooked or misapprehended by the court that would probably affect the result of the appeal,” the Supreme Court said.

Theodore Parisi, Janet Miller-Jenkins’ lawyer, has asked the court to consider penalizing Lisa Miller-Jenkins, by transferring “temporary parental rights and responsibilities to (Janet Miller-Jenkins) or hold a hearing as suggested in this court’s order dated July 19, 2004.”

The order said “failure of the custodial parent to allow contact will result in an immediate hearing on the need to change custody.”

The case was also featured recently on In the Life (see the “Family Ties” episode, and the “Family Ties” segment). In particular, watch the part that discusses the non-biological mom’s legal rights, and the grandmother spelling out that “Janet didn’t have any legal rights in Virginia.”

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Our son is four years old today.

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I honor of a certain someone I know who turns four today, and who’s sharing strawberry cupcakes with strawberry icing (his choice, mind you) with his classmates right about now, here’s a bit of a departure from the usual random mix. This one’s nothing but dance music, because it’s a happy day. Still random though, so:

1. Fire up your collection.
2. Shuffle everything.
3. Let’s see if you can count to ten.

I can. See?

1. Beautiful (Al B Rich Next Level mix) from the album “Beautiful (disc 2)” by Christina Aguilera
2. Beautiful Stranger (Calderone Club Mix) from the album “Beautiful Stranger” by Madonna
3. Popcorn (Diplo Remix) from the album “Verve Remixed 3″ by Diplo & Walter Wanderley
4. Found a Cure (Full Intention club mix) from the album “Queer as Folk: The Whole Love Thing. Sorted. (disc 1)” by Ultra Naté
5. Don’t Let Me Be The Last To Know (Thunderpuss Radio Mix) by Britney Spears
6. Lady Marmalade (Thunderpuss club mix) from the album “Lady Marmalade (feat. Lil’ Kim, Mya & Pink)” by Christina Aguilera
7. Nobody’s Supposed To Be Here from the album “Fired Up!” by Deborah Cox
8. I’m Beautiful Dammitt! (House Mix) from the album “The Groove Won’t Bite” by Uncanny Alliance
9. I’m Not Perfect from the album “12″ Single (Vinyl)” by Grace Jones
10. All I Do from the album “The Mix Summer 2006 (disc 3)” by Cleptomaniacs

Can you?

I’m not sure, really. On the one hand I’m glad there’s a conference for gay youth to talk about their experiences with bullying and harassment in school, and that there were teachers there to listen and offer support as well.

As a roomful of their peers watched yesterday, six or seven gay middle schoolers, who are more accustomed to being victims than aggressors, stepped up to a life-sized paper cutout of a boy or girl their age and systematically tore off body parts – an arm, a leg, pieces of the torso – until only the head remained. Each also delivered a verbal taunt before returning to his or her seat.

“Freak!”

“Go back to your gay home.”

Their next assignment was to tape the pieces back together. But when the exercise was over, the figure was a disjointed patchwork of what it was 15 minutes earlier. The damage had been done and the lesson about the permanent damage that intolerance inflicts had been learned, although many of the middle schoolers in the room said they already had learned it on their own.

Bullying. Disapproving parents. Indifferent teachers. Loneliness. Hallway taunts and shoves. The closet. The cover-ups. Coming out.

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It will be interesting to see what, if any, reaction people have to news that a lesbian couple in New Jersey won the right to both be listed as parents on their child’s birth certificate. And on the day before the kid was born.

Two women will be listed as parents on the birth certificate of a baby born this week in New Jersey, one of the first implications of a state Supreme Court ruling that gives same-sex couples access to the same rights as married couples.

The state and the women agreed in a closed family court proceeding Monday, the day before the child was born, that both women should be listed in light of the landmark high court ruling.

A judge agreed with the state and the women, lawyers said.

In New Jersey, birth certificates are typically mailed to parents.

Assistant Attorney General Patrick DeAlmeida said the women are the first he knows of to take advantage of new rights granted by the Oct. 25 ruling.

It’s something that’s come up for discussion here before. And since Dana reminded me that it’s National Adoption Month, and National Adoption Day is actually the day after Parker’s birthday (and the day of his birthday party; yes, there will be pictures), this seems like a good time to talk about how this issue particularly affects gay families. Because some of us have been refused reissued birth certificates for our kids before. And it throws our families into legal limbo

I suspect the birth certificate question will be an issue for some people, but the article is right about the importance of a birth certificate in everything from health insurance to custody. Should we ever be required to prove our parental relationship to our son (setting aside for now what a nightmare that would be), the birth certificate is an important document to have, because the reality our families face is that at the worst possible moments we may be required to “prove” our relationships to one another, and wonder if they’ll be recognized even with documentation.

That’s true not just for same-sex couples, but for our kids too. Imagine being kept from your child at a moment when they’re probably scared and vulnerable. Now imagine being a child kept from your parents when you’re scared and vulnerable.

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