The Republic of T.

Every time I write one of these posts, I think — or, rather, I hope — it will be the last one. Maybe that’s because I harbor two apparently unrealistic hopes: (1) that no more children will be hurt, abused, or killed by the people who are supposed to care for them, and (2) that people will stop putting our parenting in the same category as people who do hurt, abuse, and kill their own children.

Like I said, these are unrealistic hopes. Maybe someday the reality of child abuse will be like a nightmare that fades from memory and into the distant past. But not today. And maybe someday, people will stop calling all that we do as parents — from making dinner to helping with homework, etc. — as abuse, because it’s part of being a parent, and because We’re doing it. Maybe someday. But not today

Certainly not with Pride season upon us, when the AFA finds out there’s a kid kicking off a pride parade.

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I suppose it’s no secret anymore. We went down to the courthouse this morning, and got a place in line.

At least 16 couples were waiting at 7:15 a.m. inside the city’s Moultrie courthouse, which houses the marriage bureau and is just blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Sinjoyla Townsend, 41, and her partner of 12 years, Angelisa Young, 47, claimed the first spot in line just after 6 a.m.

“It’s like waking up Christmas morning,” Young said.

Washington will be the sixth place in the nation where gay marriages can take place. Because of a mandatory waiting period, however, couples won’t actually be able to marry in the District of Columbia until March 9. Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont currently issue licenses to same-sex couples.

…Terrance Heath, 41, planned to be at the courthouse with his partner, Rick Imirowicz, 43. The two have been together for 10 years and have a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old, but Heath said Wednesday feels like “a step forward.”

“My husband has always been my husband to me, but having that legal recognition, that legal protection, makes it easier to deal with any number of situations,” said Heath, a writer and blogger. “If you tell people you’re married, you don’t really have to explain much beyond that.”

The two, who live in Maryland, plan to marry on March 9, the first day possible.

The gay marriage law was introduced in the 13-member D.C. Council in October and had near-unanimous support from the beginning. The bill passed and D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty signed it in December, but because Washington is a federal district, the law had to undergo a congressional review period that expired Tuesday.

We were number 12 in line.

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I suspect these are words I will find myself repeating again and again as a parent: this is happening sooner than I expected. The “this” in question, is Santa Claus.

I was relieved, after reading Dear Prudence this week, that I’m not the only parent who’s dealing with “this.”

Dear Prudence,

My child’s father and I split up when I was five months pregnant, and I’ve raised our 8-year-old son by myself. I’ve always told him that Santa Claus exists. For the past two years, he’s been writing a wish list to Santa and putting it in the mail. Last year, his father told him that Santa does not exist, that it’s a lie parents tell their children, and that parents buy presents and tell the kids they’re from Santa. Two nights ago, my son asked me, “Mommy, does Santa really exist?” to which I replied, “What do you believe?” He said, “Papa told me Santa doesn’t exist, and you tell me Santa does. I think he does, but I don’t know.” I always knew that I would have to tell my son the truth about Santa, but I don’t want him to think that I’ve lied to him all these years. How do I tell my son that Santa doesn’t exist without losing his trust? And what’s there to live for when you don’t believe in all the things that make a moment special?

—Believing

Ugh. Here’s how it happened in my case.

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We’d talked about it earlier in the week, but hadn’t really made a definite decision to go. Then, Sunday morning I came downstairs to find this Washington Post story on the computer monitor.

On Wednesday, Oct. 7, 6-year-old Heaven Skyler Wilson dragged herself off the school bus that dropped her in front of her home on a rural road in Jetersville, just south of Richmond. The little girl, who had never had so much as an ear infection in her life, was pale and feverish and complained of an upset stomach.

The next day, Heaven’s grandmother, Pat Sparrow, took her to a nearby clinic. Heaven, usually a bright, bubbly girl with blond pigtails, dimples and effusive energy, had a sore throat and a 103-degree temperature. The doctor swabbed her for the flu, and the test was positive.

It was just something going around, Sparrow said she was told. The doctor told Sparrow to take Heaven home, give her Tylenol and chicken broth, and let her rest.

By the next morning, Heaven couldn’t breathe. Sparrow called 911.

…Two weeks later, on Oct. 21, ravaged with double pneumonia and a staph infection that deprived her brain of oxygen, Heaven was disconnected from the respirator. She lived for four minutes.

At 11:18 p.m., Heaven died in the arms of her mother, Sara Wilson. “You never heard such an awful scream from someone who loved her child so much,” Sparrow said, her voice shaking.

He was already packing the kids lunches at that point. So I knew that after swimming lessons, we’d be headed to the H1N1 vaccine clinic held this Sunday in Montgomery County. The end of our H1N1 saga — that is, the saga of getting the kids vaccinated — was finally in sight. And, as my husband said when he asked if I saw the article, “You just want to know you’ve done everything you can to protect your children.”

But, until Sunday, there wasn’t much we could do.

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The first time I heard it, I did a double-take, because I thought I heard it wrong. The second time I heard it, I rolled my eyes. The third time I heard Sarah Palin, in her interview with Oprah Winfrey, suggest that women who choose to terminate pregnancies are essentially “taking the easy way out.”

There is much — so much, really — that I object to here, but I’ll start with one really simple point.

I don’t know, and can’t know, what it’s like to decide whether or not to have an abortion. But I can listen — and have listened — to the voices and experiences of women who have. None of the women I’ve known who have faced that choice, based on what they told me, experienced it as an “easy” choice.

Such choices — the ones that have unknown and unknowable, long-term consequences for ourselves and our families — are almost never easy choices to make. As both Republicans and Democrats demonstrate, it’s the choices we make for other people — people who are not “us” — that are the easy choices.

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With all due respect to Cleve Jones — who, in fact, is due a lot of respect for his years of activism — we do not need another LGBT march on Washington.

An activist who worked alongside slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk announced plans Sunday for a march on Washington this fall to demand that Congress establish equality and marriage rights for the lesbian, gay and transgender community.

Cleve Jones, whose character in last year’s award-winning movie Milk was played by Emile Hirsch, said the march planned for Oct. 11 will coincide with National Coming Out Day and launch a new chapter in the gay rights movement. He made the announcement during a rally at the annual Utah Pride Festival.

In an interview Friday, Jones said a confluence of events — a new president, the success of Milk which earned Sean Penn an Oscar, and Proposition 8 — makes this the right time to intensify the fight for equality.

“All of this working together has opened this new chapter,” Jones said. “I intend to make the most of it.”

As usual, I’m late to this story. I read it late last night, but at this point in my life, writing/blogging is near the bottom of my list. It comes after everything and everyone else. So by the time I get around to blogging a story like this one, it’s already been beat to death and much of what I’m going to say has been said already.

Nonetheless, I’ll say now what I said last night. We don’t need another march on Washington. Not now. Maybe when we have a victory to celebrate, but not when we have so much work to do.

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This series is overdue for an update. I’ve been meaning to get to it for a while now. But every time a relevant news story reminds me of it, there’s always something more pressing.

The entire time the “Octomom” saga played out in headlines and newscasts, I thought about continuing this series. Only, every time I’d get started, there’d be another revelation. At some point, I got tired of trying to keep up. I kept it in the back of my mind, though.

To tell the truth, I’ve never watched Jon & Kate Plus 8, except for a few minutes when I stopped in the middle of channel surfing and caught a few minutes of it. I didn’t know why, but something about the show creeped me out. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But when the allegations about his affair, then her alleged affair, then her alleged violent rages, his alleged lack of ambition, her tummy tuck and nose job, his hair plugs, and the difference between the reality of their marriage and the facade presented on television, I found myself asking “Why are these people famous?” All they did was have babies, and have more at one time than most people.

These people are famous for reproducing?

Then it hit me, what bothered me about the very idea of the show, let alone the show itself.

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iv

You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression … If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. And if we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie, love has no meaning.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Obama and other Democrats have not said as much to LGBT activists. In fact, their actions could be interpreted to say “Please, don’t make me do it now.” As my own exchange with Pelosi suggests, Democrats seem to be taking the “rising tide” approach. Fixing the economy can help same-sex households in the same way it can hep the rest of the country. Universal health care — if it includes the kind of public plan Obama ran on — helps same-sex couples and their families by divorcing health insurance from both employment status and marital status.

Health care reform could certainly remove obstacles to health insurance for gay couples.

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I realize I should probably let it go. After all, there are some people you’re just never gonna reach.

Let me explain it this way. When I first came to D.C. to work in politics, and to work specifically on gay rights issues, I was told and came to understand that people fall into three categories when you’re working for social change:

1. The people who are on your side.

2. The people who aren’t on your side, but could be if they’re persuaded.

3. The people who are not on your side and never will be.

The first group you need to talk to in order to keep them informed and motivated. The second group you need to talk to in order to make your case and move them to your side. Talking to the third group is a waste of time and energy better spent shoring up support in the first group and winning support in the second group.

Some people are unreachable. The problem is they say things that must not go unchallenged.

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I don’t remember where I heard it, but it’s something a core belief of mine: Freedom and liberty are meaningless concepts without two things—knowledge of them and the ability to act on them. To my mind, the former is basically education, and the latter means health care. I’ve come to believe that a country that can’t provide those two basic things to its citizens can’t have more than a tenuous grasp on the two concepts above.

I’ve wanted to write about health care for some time, but until recently hadn’t taken the opportunity. I ventured down that road with an earlier post. Now I have a post up on the blog at the day-job, about a health care plan the organization is promoting, that would—if everything adds up as it’s supposed to—guarantee coverage to almost every American.

Given what I said about that core belief of mine, the idea of universal or near-universal health care is something I’m passionate about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that believe it’s criminal that—in a country as wealthy as ours—there are millions of children without health insurance. But lately I’ve become passionate about for another reason, and one raises a question for me.

Is health care a gay issue? I don’t know that it’s a priority for any of our political organizations, but I’m starting to believe that it should be.

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First of all, this post is not what you think it’s about. (Though I could write style-crampin’ aspects of having an infant who doesn’t sleep through the night yet. Suffice it to say that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.) No, it’s about the French.

Or rather, it’s about what they French have done now. It’s something that would never be done here. At least not without a whole lot of whooping and hollering. Forget Maplethorpe for a minute. Can you imagine the public reaction if an American museum featured a new exhibit that’s basically a children’s guide to sex?
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This Friday, I had something anyone who’s ever lived through the first few months of parenting a newborn will understand is something to be treasured: a day off. The rest of the family left the house in the morning, and I went back to bed. But, of course, we never take a day off from being parents. Not that I want to, mind you, but those few extra hours of sleep Friday morning (I went back to bed. Surprised?) were sweet.

I’d taken the day off, because Parker’s pre-school was having a special performance, and of course we were going to be there to see it. Parker had been talking about it for the past month. At first he decided he was going to dance, and after he picked a song I burned it to CD so that he could take it to school with him and practice. But I know my son. He’s very stage shy. At home, with us as an audience, he sings, dances and puts on quite a show. But he generally prefers not to be in the spotlight and not to be the center a big audience’s attention.

So I wasn’t surprised when he announced that he’d volunteered (with one other child) for the job of handing out tickets. (Pieces of construction paper colored by Parkers class served as “tickets.”) I told him, “That’s a very important job. If nobody handed out tickets, there’d be no audience to see the show,” and that Daddy and Papa would be there so he could give us our tickets. And he did, as well as handing tickets to other parents as they arrived. He even helped with some of the props for the other students performances.

We were very proud and we told him so.
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(With apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

It began with Veggie Booty. Or rather, I should say, it ended with Veggie Booty. As was my habit, I’d tossed it into the cart during our family’s weekend grocery shopping trip. I didn’t read the label, in part because I’d read it before, to make sure there were no animal products among the ingredients, and didn’t think I needed to read it again. Then I learned about the recall.

Also, shopping with a healthy, active five-year-old doesn’t lend itself to taking the time to read labels. So I didn’t. Until I read that Veggie Booty was recalled because it was tainted with salmonella, which was traced back to a spray-on seasoning, which was eventually traced back to China. Fifty two people became sick, complete with bloody diarrhea, including an 18-month-old.

My spouse and I each take about 30 seconds or less to read a food label. Even though we’re shopping with our five-year-old son and our two-month-old son, we have all the time in the world. In fact, because of them, we have all the time in the world to read food labels. We have 1,900 years, to be exact, because it will take the Food and Drug Administration 1,900 years to catch up on food import inspections.

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I’m at home with Dylan today and working from home. (Dylan’s doing very well, by the way. He’s nearing 2 months old and has gotten so much bigger! He was just under six pounds when he was born, and he’s just over 11 now; and he’s got a few extra chins, chubbier cheeks, and chubbier legs. He likes watching Parker play, and likes to be held upright and walked around the house.)

So between taking care of him and getting some work done, there may not be much posting here today, except for this post—which I stayed up last night to complete after getting Dylan to sleep—and possibly one more that I’ve been working on for a bit. (That’s if I can finish it.)

I haven’t been able to do as much writing as I’d like to lately, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading. (It’s relatively easy to read news & blogs online while rocking Dylan in my office chair. And there’s a lot out there I’d blog about if I could manage to find the time and the energy, and get them to synch up. In lieu of that, today seems like a good day for a roundup.
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It’s inevitable that, since the poisonous parenting series started, someone who drops into the the middle of it without reading the previous posts (or perhaps without reading any of it) completely misunderstands the point of it. That’s what seems to have happened with one commenter on the previous post.

I am a black hetrosexual woman who reads your blog often. It is really bothersome that you choose to highlight the worst of the worst of hetrosexual parenting. How can we have meaningful dialogue about our differing views when all you do is degrade and mock hetrosexual parents?????

Of course, the point is not to “degrade and mock heterosexual parents.”
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In many ways, when it comes to the presidential primaries, I feel like I “don’t have a dog in this fight.” But it’s interesting to me that some people are already declaring the Democratic primaries a two person race. And, apparently, to some gay voters the candidate’s differences on DOMA are “minor.”

As Georgia voters prepare to head to the polls on Feb. 5 to take part in what’s been dubbed Super Duper Tuesday, when more than 20 states hold their presidential primaries, many local gay leaders are speaking out with public endorsements.

With Hillary Clinton fresh off a crucial win in New Hampshire and Barack Obama still riding on his win in Iowa, local gay voters acknowledge they are torn between the two.

Both Democratic presidential candidates claim nearly the same stance on gay issues such as repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” as well as providing legal protections for gay couples. But John Edwards, also a strong gay rights supporter, seems to have lost his footing in the race, according to University of Georgia political science professor Charles Bullock.

In a race where none of the “leading” candidates support marriage equality, and the candidates who do support marriage equality get almost no support in terms of contributions or votes, the matter of repealing DOMA becomes—or should become—more important.

current events, elections, family, gay rights, politics

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Or else. That’s what I thought when I read about John and Cynthia Burke, after someone linked to the article in a comment on my post at Pam’s.

After six years of childless marriage, John and Cynthia Burke of Newark decided to adopt a baby boy through a state agency. Since the Burkes were young, scandal-free and solvent, they had no trouble with the New Jersey Bureau of Children’s Services—until investigators came to the line on the application that asked for the couple’s religious affiliation.

John Burke, an atheist, and his wife, a pantheist, had left the line blank. As a result, the bureau denied the Burkes’ application. After the couple began court action, however, the bureau changed its regulations, and the couple was able to adopt a baby boy from the Children’s Aid and Adoption Society in East Orange.

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One video is worth another.

This is a voice you won’t hear during the upcoming presidential debate on ABC.
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Michael in Norfolk points out an article about Obama’s latest statement on DOMA.

In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter Monday, December 17, Tobias Wolff, a gay man who’s chair of the national LGBT policy committee for the Obama campaign, called the Illinois senator a “fighter” who will stand by his principles.

…Wolff, 37, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, also noted that while he disagrees with Obama on the issue of same-sex marriage, he nonetheless believes that Obama is the better candidate. Obama, as well as the other leading Democratic candidates, support civil unions. Wolff supports marriage equality. But Wolff drew a distinction with Obama’s and Clinton’s position on the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Obama supports repeal of all DOMA, while Clinton is on record supporting repeal of only part of the legislation. President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law, as well as the anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy that prohibits gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces.

At the Logo presidential forum in August, Clinton said that she would repeal Section 3 of DOMA, which states that, for federal purposes, “marriage” can mean only marriage between a man and a woman, thus it essentially denies same-sex couples more than 1,100 federal benefits enjoyed by married heterosexual couples. Section 2, however, says that states do not have to recognize same-sex relationships, and Clinton has not gone so far as to support repeal of that provision.

What that part of DOMA means, Wolff said, is that gay couples could have problems should they move to a state that doesn’t recognize their relationship. That section of DOMA could also come into play regarding custody or wrongful death issues.

“States can disregard judgments,” Wolff said, referring to the problems that could arise. “Senator Obama from the start said this is wrong and we shouldn’t be making excuses.”

I’ve already made it clear who I’m supporting during the primaries. I’m voting my hopes until I have to settle for what I can get. And while I’ve been critical of all the rest of the Democratic field, Obama’s statement on DOMA does underscore a distinction that should become more important as the field narrows.
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