The Republic of T.

Picking up where a previous post left off, the hubby told me about the conversation he and Parker had in the car yesterday morning, on the way to Parker’s pre-school.

I’m not sure why it is that Parker and his Papa talk politics on their drives to and from home. But Parker made a rather touching leap from the political to the personal in the course of this brief chat.

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Forget green cards. A growing number of Americans are getting hitched to get health insurance.

Some people marry for love, some for companionship, and others for status or money. Now comes another reason to get hitched: health insurance.

In a poll released today, 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.

“It’s a small number but a powerful result, because it shows how paying for healthcare is reflected not only in family budgets but in life decisions,” said Drew E. Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which commissioned the survey as part of its regular polling on healthcare.

…What surprised researchers was that such costs had become a factor in marriage decisions. “We should have asked about divorce,” said Altman, joking.

Those who cited health insurance as a factor in deciding to marry tended to have modest incomes. About 6 in 10 were in households making less than $50,000 a year, said Mollyann Brodie, who directs Kaiser’s opinion research. They also were younger, with 4 in 10 between 18 and 34.

Maybe they should have asked about divorce. They’d have found that at least some people stay married for the sake of health insurance.

Whether people get married or stay married for the sake of health insurance, who can blame them?

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No, I don’t mean gay dads. (More about us later.) I mean dads with gay son, who are proud of their gay sons.

I posted about the Details article on heterosexual dads who are worried their sons might be gay. (But, hey, they’re not homophobes. Some of their best friends are gay. So they can’t be homophobic, right?) Well, PFLAG is responding to the article with a weeklong series of posts by dads about why they’re proud of their sons.

OK, I’ll admit up front that PFLAG has a special place in my heart, for many reasons. I still get teary eyed when I see the PFLAG contingent marching in the Capitol Pride parade. Whenever I saw them, I’d usually run out into the middle of their group and get as many hugs from as many supportive parents as I could.

I’ve only recently begun to restrain myself from doing that, since I got kids of my own to parent. (One of whom is big enough to give great hugs.) But if they don’t mind, these PFLAG dads have made their way onto my list of “PFLAG Parents I’d Like To Hug.”

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This weekend, we attended a local conference for LGBT parents and families, and I spoke on a panel about interracial couples and intercultural families. At some point, I found myself speaking less as a gay dad and more as a black man raising two black sons, and wondering aloud just how I would prepare them for the reality of what they will likely face as black men, and how I will prepare them for that without catalyzing what I know is an inevitable loss of innocence; the same innocence I love to see in them, and so want to protect as a parent.

But I know that I will be doing them a disservice as their father if I don’t prepare them for the reality I’ve experience myself, and that they will both have to face in their own time. It’s no surprise that in the middle of the panel discussion, I remembered an exchange I had with my own father.

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What kind of blogger am I? Am I a “gay blogger”? Am I a “political blogger”? Am I a “Black blogger”? Which variety of blogger am I first?

Endless questions, without concrete answers. But it looks like I can add one more category: Daddy Blogger

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I love finding this kind of thing, and I think it’s worth pointing out when I do. We subscribe to Newsweek, and I usually thumb through the newest issue when it comes in, which is what I did when the “Splitsville” issue arrived. It sounds weird, but I start reading Newsweek from the back. I usually want to read “Newsmakers” first, then see what’s being reviewed as far as books, music, and movies, before I get to the feature story, about “the children of divorce, all grown up.”

Given the subject matter, I wasn’t expecting it to have a gay angle. (Because gay people can’t even get divorced, but that’s another story.) Lo and behold, when I finally got to the photo for the cover story, there it was. The gay angle. It wasn’t the story, but a part of the story. And that, folks, is progress.

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It’s a question posed to some parents, and especially — in one form or another — gay parents. I was asked this question during an interview with Slovenian television (of all things). The question got cut from our segment of the interview, which instead included a short clip of me talking about gender roles (or the lack thereof) in our household. But when I saw that Details magazine has tackled the question, it seemed like a good time to address it.

Of course, Details didn’t ask this question of gay parents, but focused instead on heterosexual men. And not just any heterosexual men, but heterosexual men who have gay friends and are “okay” with gay people. To a point.

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Remember this guy?

Sometimes, I’d swear I married him. Allow me to explain.

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Helping out a colleague at work required me to do something I haven’t done in about five years: watch television news. Specifically, I had to watch the Sunday morning news shows, where various political types are interviewed by the likes of Tim Russert and George Stephanopolis. I even had to watch Fox News, something I never to unless I’m tied to a chair with my head immobilized and my eye’s taped open. (See the picture above.)

I was watching Meet the Press, featuring a debate between Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell (both Democrats) about the Obama CLinton race, when Tim Russert brought up something that seemed, well, strange and brought up rather suddenly.

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I’ve said before that I’m not supporting either Clinton or Obama in the Democratic primaries, and I’m still not. (Though, as the contest wears on, one campaign is seriously trying my patience.) In part, that’s the differences between them, for the most part, are still not that stark to me. And when it comes to gay issues, the difference is becoming less clear in some ways.

That said, something Hillary said recently set me off. Truth be told, I probably should have included Obama in the title of the this post — given the latest news about his campaign — but it wouldn’t have had the same ring to me. I also don’t have as much history with Obama as I do with the Clintons.

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Usually, it’s just the inevitable question that comes up as one completes the mundane tasks of life, like rolling over a 401(k) or — as happened to me last week — while making an appointment with a new doctor: are you married. Usually it’s not so much a matter of life or death as it it just filling out a form.

Usually, I take a deep breath and answer that I’m “partnered” or that I’m “as married as I can be,” which is immediately understood. Then we move on to the next question. But there are a thousand different ways in which the answer to that question can impact our lives and our families, because we can’t legally marry, and the law can’t figure out what to do do with us, or how to define us, and hasn’t caught up with us as we forge ahead with our lives, making commitments to each other, and creating our families as we go. In those cases, we don’t often gee the benefit of the doubt.

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Sometimes it seems like being gay and having a husband means having to talk abou the kind of things that other people take for granted, even while doing something as mundane as rolling over a 401(k) It definitely means having to think about and talk about things that I bet a good number of married heterosexual couples don’t think about. In many cases, they don’t have to. Just being married protects them.

It’s something we faced when we finalized Parker’s adoption, and took the occasion to update our wills, as well as completing advance directives and medical powers of attorney. And it’s something we’ll have to think about again, as we update our wills and other documents when we finalize Dylan’s adoption. It was yesterday, after the social worker (who’d came over for one of the required home study visits before Dylan’s adoption is finalized), and after we had dinner that the hubby told me about the latest development in Maryland.

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I don’t know if this counts as a trend or not, but I didn’t expect to see something like this so soon after the previous post. This time is the Lutheran Church, which still opposes marriage equality but expresses regret that "church teachings have been used to hurt gays and lesbians."

A task force drafting a statement on sexuality for the nation’s largest Lutheran group said Thursday that the church should continue defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

However, the panel did not condemn same-gender relationships. The committee expressed regret that historic Lutheran teachings have been used to hurt gays and lesbians, and acknowledged that some congregations already accept same-sex couples.

From there, it actually gets more interesting.

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