Have a good holiday, if you’re celebrating it!

In Creative Personal Economic Stimulus: Boston’s Bounty Bucks, she discusses a nice idea for vouchers that turn $10 of regular food stamps into $20 to spend at the local farmers’ market. She also gives a shout-out to the farmer’s market in Madison, Wisconsin, the city where we met and which just extended domestic partnership benefits to same-sex couples.

She then discusses whether title insurance is worth buying. Before you run screaming at such a topic, I’ll observe that she manages to turn even that dry matter into something interesting (okay, maybe not as interesting as, say, the new season of Weeds), and that’s one of the many reasons I love her. Along the way, she makes her own call for a little piece of financial reform.

Nothing LGBT-specific to any of that. What with money being power, however, the smarter we can be with ours, the more power we’ll have as a community. It pays—monetarily and otherwise—to educate ourselves on financial matters.

(If the embedded video above doesn’t work for you, try it here.)

Brought to you in partnership with After Ellen.

The news reports this morning about the circumstances of the conception of Michael Jackson’s children are suggesting that the information might impact who gets custody of the children. But that just shows ignorance about the difference between legal parenthood and biology. They do not always go together and there is nothing new about that.

That comes on the same day that The Linster at After Ellen reports on The Kids Are All Right, an upcoming movie starring Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as lesbian moms. When their oldest child turns 18, she meets their sperm donor, and family tensions ensue.

Like The Linster, I rolled my eyes at the thought of yet another lesbian-mom storyline that focuses on the sperm donor. Yes, many lesbian moms choose donors who are willing to meet their offspring when the children turn 18. Some sperm banks even specialize in such donors. And being able to have some sense of one’s donor is important even for children of unknown donors. It doesn’t mean they’ll give up their moms to go live with him, but it helps them fit a piece of their identity puzzle into place. (Once again, Abigail Garner’s Families Like Mine is a great resource on this topic.)

I’m just afraid the behemoth that is Hollywood will screw this up, even though the writer/director is out lesbian Lisa Cholodenko. She also wrote and directed High Art, starring Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell. I remember not being thrilled with that film, mostly because I couldn’t personally identify with the characters. (I saw it years ago, though, and am willing to revisit.) Maybe a movie with lesbian moms will change my mind. They just better be careful not to fall into the trap of biology is destiny, however, as the media seems to be doing with Michael Jackson. If they can show it as one part of a more complex whole, however, then the film may break new ground.

With an all-star cast, the film will also carry the weight of portraying lesbian parenthood to a broad audience. I hope it doesn’t sag under such expectations and try to stuff in too many themes and sub-characters simply for the purpose of being inclusive (where have we seen that happen before?), but remains true to the one slice of our diverse lives that it chooses to reveal.

What storylines from LGBT parenting do you think most need to be told in television or film?

Wisconsin is, in fact, the first state to offer such benefits after enacting a constitutional amendment that bans both marriages and civil unions for same-sex couples. Let’s review:

• A domestic partnership in Wisconsin offers limited rights, but civil unions are unconstitutional.
• In New Jersey, civil unions are the same as domestic partnerships in California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington.
• In California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, domestic partnerships are equivalent to marriages in all but name.
• New Jersey domestic partnerships are still around, however, for same- or opposite-sex couples over 62 years old, and for those who registered before February 19, 2007. They get an extensive but not marriage-equivalent set of rights and benefits.

Would Wisconsin recognize a California domestic partnership, but not a New Jersey civil union, which is equivalent in all but name? Would they recognize California domestic partnerships of same-sex couples, but not the marriages of the 18,000 couples who wed there before Prop 8 was upheld? That old line about roses doesn’t quite seem to hold.

Yes, I know a lawyer could tell me the answers. Point is, though, one would need a lawyer to do so. I’m thinking of inventing a secret decoder ring that translates one’s relationship status into whatever it happens to be in that state. Of course, in most states it would still come up blank.

Much as this makes me grumble, though, I do find something satisfying in the fact that a state with constitutional bans like Wisconsin has made as much progress as it has. On, Wisconsin.

Personal stories:

• CNN.com has a must-read article on the perspective of children growing up with gay parents. Thanks to Abigail Garner, one of their interviewees, for the tip. (And if you haven’t read her book, Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is, do get it. I recommend it for all LGBT parents and their teen/adult children.)
• The gay couple who were the first in Britain to have both names on their children’s birth certificates are now expecting their fourth and fifth children. In 1999, the couple used donor eggs and a surrogate mother in the U.S. to have twins, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling the pair could both be named as parents on the children’s birth certificates. They also have a five-year-old son.
• The Washington Post reports on the gay and lesbian families in Prince George’s County, Maryland and the suburbanization of gay and lesbian families generally. Much as I myself am, unbelievably, a suburban-mom dyke and happy with my life, I hope some of us have lifestyles that differ. Variety being the spice, and all that.
• A couple in Sweden is attempting to raise their child (now two-and-a-half years old) without gender norms. They do not use a gendered name or pronouns, and have kept the child’s biological sex a secret. While I’m all for raising a child without gender norms, I also don’t think it is right to teach children that their gender is anything to be kept secret or be ashamed of. Besides, I think all their best intentions will go astray when the child starts school.

School issues:

• Victoria Cruz and Deoine Scott were voted “Best Couple” by their peers at Mott Haven Village Preparatory (Public) High School in the Bronx, the first time in the school’s history a same-sex couple had been chosen (and maybe the first time in Bronx history, too).
• The head of a high school English department in Litchfield, N.H., is quitting after some parents complained about reading assignments issued by another teacher in a class unit called “Love/Gender/Family,” part of an elective English class for juniors and seniors. They objected to stories on “homosexuality, abortion, drugs, and cannibalism,” including I Like Guys by David Sedaris, The Crack Cocaine Diet by Laura Lippman, Survivor Type by Stephen King, and Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway.

Politics and Law:

• Not surprisingly, the Family Research Council has launched a Web site (www.stopjennings.org) to try and stop President Obama’s appointment of Kevin Jennings, founder of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, as head of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools at the Dept. of Education.
• A lesbian mother in Indiana won a case this week against her parents, who objected to her lesbianism and her new partner’s relationship with the child. The mother eventually denied them access to the child, and they sued for court-ordered visitation. Nancy Polikoff tipped me off to the case, and adds her own analysis of parents’ constitutional rights.

Entertainment:

• In my guest post yesterday at the Washington Post’s On Parenting blog, I noted that children’s stories and shows are saturated with the concept of marriage—meaning marriage of opposite-sex couples. Brett Berk, aka “The Gay Uncle,” points out a new study that proves this, looking at “the role and prevalence of heterosexual romantic love in Disney’s top-grossing G-rated movies from 1990-2005.” I would have loved to do a study like that myself, but I don’t know if I could eat that much popcorn. (For more on Disney and LGBT families, check out my recent piece on Mary Poppins and Prop 8.)

Please also feel free to sign up for a once-daily e-mail digest of Mombian posts, join the Mombian Facebook Group, follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to my RSS feed. It’s all about community and communication.

To my regular readers: Stacey Garfinkle, the editor of WaPo’s On Parenting blog, was kind enough to ask me to do a guest post for her site. The piece, “‘He Has Two Moms,’” is up now. I hope you’ll pop over and have a read, leave a comment, and check out some of her other posts on this common journey of raising kids.

In many ways, it was the beginning of the LGBT civil rights movement—but if there’s anything I’ve learned as an erstwhile historian, it’s that beginnings are seldom as clear cut as they first appear. One cannot often reduce such broad social changes to a single event, catalyzing as it may have been.

Joan Nestle, who founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in 1975, perhaps said it best when she wrote:

I certainly don’t see gay and lesbian history starting with Stonewall . . .  and I don’t see resistance starting with Stonewall. What I do see is a historical coming together of forces, and the sixties changed how human beings endured things in this society and what they refused to endure. . . . Certainly something special happened on that night in 1969, and we’ve made it more special in our need to have what I call a point of origin . . . it’s more complex than saying that it all started with Stonewall.

(In The Question of Equality: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America since Stonewall, ed. David Deitcher.)

We are at another coming together of forces in LGBT rights, I believe, a confluence of awareness, activism, and impatience that may serve as a historical milestone for those looking back in another 40 years. We build on the achievements of our predecessors, and we hope to leave the world a little better for our children and their peers.

A joyous Pride to all of you.

More good news for non-bio moms, to add to the Jenkins-Miller decision I posted about earlier: A California Court of Appeal has denied the latest appeal (PDF) of Kristina S., a biological, “ex-lesbian” mom who has been trying since 2004 to prevent her former partner Charisma R. from being declared a legal parent to the child they planned, conceived, and began to raise together. Kristina was represented by the ultra-conservative Liberty Counsel.

Charisma left a comment on my Enough Already post a few months ago. She wrote:

[Kristina] moved away to Texas when our daughter was 3 and until this past year I hadn’t seen our daughter since she was 5 months old. Like Isabella, our daughter turned a year older this April - she is now 6. I am now a legal parent (have been since she was 3) and have court-ordered visitation in Houston, where they moved. My ex is currently challenging everything that has been thusfar determined by the courts and custody evaluations, etc with an appeal (the 3rd in this case already), which I attended yesterday.

Today’s ruling is the outcome of that appeal. It’s good to see the court upheld Charisma’s parenthood. Best wishes to her and her daughter.

After the jump, an excerpt from today’s ruling so you can see what she has been through. My own child, like hers, is also six—which makes this particularly poignant to me.

After deciding they wanted children, Charisma and Kristina contacted a sperm bank, jointly filled out the required paperwork to obtain sperm from an anonymous donor, and pursued their goal of Kristina becoming pregnant through in-home artificial insemination. Charisma assisted Kristina in the insemination process. The couple kept a joint journal regarding the process, in which Kristina was referred to as “mommy” and Charisma was referred to as “momma.”

After five months of attempts at in-home insemination, Charisma ordered two additional vials of sperm in early July 2002. On the evening of July 8, Charisma used one vial to inseminate Kristina at home; the next morning Kristina took the second vial to a doctor who inseminated her through intrauterine insemination. One of these two inseminations resulted in Kristina becoming pregnant.

Amalia was born in April 2003. Charisma was present for the birth and cut the umbilical cord. On the birth certificate, signed by Kristina, Amalia was given a hyphenated last name that was a combination of Charisma‟s and Kristina‟s last names. The couple brought Amalia into their home and shared parenting responsibilities for the first six weeks of her life. At that point, Kristina returned to work and Charisma cared for Amalia full-time during the day; she also provided care at night.

In July 2003, approximately seven weeks after Kristina returned to work, she moved out of the home she shared with Charisma, taking Amalia with her. Since then, and before the trial court ordered reunification in 2008, Kristina allowed Charisma to see Amalia on only two occasions in the summer of 2003. In the summer of 2005, Kristina moved to Texas with Amalia.

In May 2004, Charisma filed a petition to establish a parental relationship with Amalia. The trial court denied the petition, concluding that Charisma lacked standing to bring the action under the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA) (§ 7600 et seq.). (Charisma R. v. Kristina S. (2006) 140 Cal.App.4th 301, 303 (Charisma I).) Charisma appealed, and this court reversed in June 2006, concluding that Charisma had standing to establish parentage under the UPA despite the fact that she lacked a biological relationship to Amalia. . . .

On remand, the trial court found that Charisma is a presumed parent and that the presumption had not been rebutted.

• The Senate Judiciary committee held a hearing on the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Attorney General Eric Holder gave a statement in support. There is some buzz that the Act will be attached to the Defense Authorization bill, which happened to a previous version of the bill and helped kill it.
• Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), and Jared Polis (D-CO) along with eight other House members reintroduced a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that includes protections for LGBT people.
• The White House press secretary said there will be no stop order to prevent dismissals of military personnel under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell because the administration wants a “durable legislative solution.”
• The Department of Justice’s response to GLAD’s DOMA lawsuit had been due Monday, June 29, but has been postponed. GLAD explains: “Per agreement between the parties (but still waiting court approval which is a virtual certainty) we will be filing an amended complaint in late July. It will include all of our tax plaintiffs, reflect the fact that the Toneys are no longer plaintiffs because their issue has been resolved, and perhaps make some other changes. The government’s response will be due on September 18, or 45 days after our amended complaint is filed.”
• The ACLU, Lambda Legal, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the federal challenge to Prop 8 led by the American Foundation for Equal Rights and attorneys Theodore Olson and David Boies, although the groups had originally criticized the wisdom of the suit.
• Lawyers for President Obama are drafting guidelines barring workplace discrimination against transgender federal employees.
• Although parts of the LGBT community have vehemently criticized the Obama administration for its slow action on LGBT rights and apparent support of DOMA, the 10th annual LGBT Leadership Council fundraiser brought in nearly $1 million. Protesters outside carried signs criticizing those who chose to attend.
• The National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and allied organizations announced the New Beginning Initiative, “to push for concrete federal administration policy and regulatory changes directly benefiting the lives of LGBT people and eliminating discrimination from federal policies.” The initiative’s first recommendations focus on “pro-LGBT public policy changes the Obama administration can implement without legislative action.”
• Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) introduced the Ending Health Disparities for LGBT Americans Act (ELHDA), the first comprehensive approach to establish LGBT nondiscrimination policies for all federal health programs.
• The U.S. Government apologized to Dr. Frank Kameny for dismissing him 52 years ago from his job as an astronomer in the Army Map Service because he is gay.

And around the states:

• The Delaware legislature voted to add sexual orientation (but not gender identity) to its list of protected classes. It now goes to the governor, who is expected to sign it.
• A U.S. District Court in Georgia denied the state General Assembly’s motion to dismiss Lambda Legal’s federal lawsuit on behalf of Vandy Beth Glenn, a transgender woman who was fired after she told her employer she planned to transition from male to female.
• Michigan state Rep. Pam Byrnes said she wants to repeal a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman, and have the state recognize marriages of same-sex couples.

Around the world:

• Ireland now has its first openly gay council leader, Ruth Illingworth of Mullingar.
• The Irish minister for justice said he will soon seek cabinet approval for a civil partnerships bill that could be enacted by the end of the year.
• The President of Lithuania vetoed legislation that had been approved by the Seimas (Parliament), and would have banned “propaganda for homosexuality and bisexuality” in schools and”other places accessible to youngsters.”
• The AP has a profile of Aaron Katz, Poland’s first openly gay rabbi.
• A Turkish football (soccer) referee has sued his country’s football federation after he was fired for being gay. Despite widespread homophobia in the country, his stance has gained him much support from his family, fellow referees, and others.