The Religious Wrong: RENOUNCE YOUR KIDS!!!

From Think Progress:

On Monday, the United Methodist Church convicted Rev. Frank Schaefer on two counts against the Church for officiating his son’s same-sex wedding. On Tuesday, the impaneled jury determined his sentence: Schaefer is suspended for 30 days, and if it at the end of that time he has not renounced his support for marriage equality, he will be defrocked.

Schaefer, however, was unapologetic, refusing the invitation to “repent of your actions”:

SCHAEFER: [The Church] needs to stop judging people based on their sexual orientation. We have to stop the hate speech. We have to stop treating them as second-class Christians. [...]

I will never be silent again. This is what I have to do. [...]

I have to minister to those who hurt and that’s what I’m doing.

Three of Schaefer’s four children identify as gay.

But...family values?

How Not to Be a Parent

Amy Dickinson, Advice Columnist

From The Daily Grind:

The parent writes:

Dear Amy:

I recently discovered that my son, who is 17, is a homosexual.

We are part of a church group and I fear that if people in that group find out they will make fun of me for having a gay child.

He won’t listen to reason, and he will not stop being gay. I feel as if he is doing this just to get back at me for forgetting his birthday for the past three years – I have a busy work schedule.

Please help him make the right choice in life by not being gay. He won’t listen to me, so maybe he will listen to you.

- Feeling Betrayed

Replied Amy:

Dear Betrayed:

You could teach your son an important lesson by changing your sexuality to show him how easy it is.

Try it for the next year or so: Stop being a heterosexual to demonstrate to your son that a person’s sexuality is a matter of choice – to be dictated by one’s parents, the parents’ church and social pressure.

I assume that my suggestion will evoke a reaction that your sexuality is at the core of who you are. The same is true for your son. He has a right to be accepted by his parents for being exactly who he is.

When you ‘forget’ a child’s birthday, you are basically negating him as a person. It is as if your saying that you have forgotten his presence in the world. How very sad for him.

Pressuring your son to change his sexuality is wrong.

If you cannot learn to accept him as he is, it might be safest for him to live elsewhere.

A group that could help you and your family figure out how to navigate this is PFLAG.org. This organization is founded for parents, families, friends and allies of LGBT people, and has helped countless families through this challenge. Please research and connect with a local chapter.

- Amy

Let me make sure I understand this. She forgot her son's birthday not once, not twice, but three times in a row, she is mostly concerned about being made fun of for having a gay child, and somehow, it's the child with the problem? I really hope this mother pulls her head from her rectum and realizes that as a parent, you put your kids first. Her son did not betray her, she betrayed him.

Explaining Homosexuality To Children

When An Anti-Gay Activist Has a Gay Child

From Queerty: 

For many years she believed this lie as an unquestionable truth, until the day she found out her 13-year-old son, Jordan, was gay. Montgomery said she learned about Jordan’s sexuality after reading his journal.

“He was in eighth grade and he started becoming really depressed,” she explained. “He didn’t want to talk to us about it. And he had recently started keeping a journal. So I really felt strongly to go read his journal.”

“He only had a couple entries in it,” Montgomery continued. “And in one of the entries he had made a comment that said that he had noticed a boy in his class and he noticed what beautiful eyes this boy had.”

After realizing her son was gay, Montgomery felt a rush of conflicting emotions, which she said she had to work through.

“One of the first thoughts I had when I learned that Jordan was gay was everything that I thought a gay person was, he was none of those things,” she explained. “So I had to immediately let go of all of these — what I thought a gay person was — and unlearn all of these old stereotypes and relearn what it meant to be gay.”

~

Despite everything, Montgomery says she still has “hope” that things will get better between her family and their church. A new website, mormonsandgays.org, aims to start an open and accepting dialog about the LGBT community within the Mormon church.

How a Father Dealt With His Son, the Bully

From the Advocate:  

When traditional disciplinary methods such as grounding and even hard labor had no impact on his son's behavior, Jose Lagares took his son to a busy street corner in Killeen, Texas, Tuesday, and made him hold up a sign that read, "I am a bully. HONK! If you hate bullies."

KCEN reports that Lagares received his fair share of criticism for his decision, which is why he returned to the same intersection Wednesday, carrying his own sign, reading, "I am not sorry!!! Honk 2 Stop Bullying."

Lagares said bullying is a serious issue and that as the parent of a bully, he's committed to putting a stop to his son's behavior. 

"I'm not going to allow my child to be someone else's pain," said Lagares. "We don't need another Columbine … and I refuse for my child to be the cause of that."

Lagares told KCEN that when his son returned to school Wednesday, he apologized, of his own accord, to the student he'd bullied. 

Outing Closeted Russian Politicians

A Bill Precluding Rapists From Custodial Rights

Rep. Schultz (D-FL)

From Think Progress: 

On Thursday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) held a press conference to explain their recently-introduced legislation designed to help rape survivors maintain full custody rights over their children. The lawmakers were joined by Shauna Prewitt, a rape survivor and victims’ rights advocate who was forced to endure the type of custody battle with her rapist that the bill seeks to prevent. 

The Rape Survivor Child Custody Act would provide funding incentives to states that have laws allowing mothers of children conceived through rape to “seek court-ordered termination of the parental rights of her rapist.” These states would receive federal grant funding for programs authorized under the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). 

Currently, 31 states have no custodial rights protections for mothers of children conceived in rape. Of the 19 states that do have some protections, only six reach the standard advocated by the proposed bill...

It will be interesting to see how people against this bill justify their position.

More Lies From Social Conservative Groups

From Towleroad: 

This time around, NOM and The Heritage Foundation are trying to present pseudo-scientific data linking marriage equality with single motherhood, children in poverty, and the claim that men will start to leave their wives if they are allowed to marry other men.  

The data in question comes via a chart publicized by the two groups, comparing rates of poverty of single-mother households to that of two-parent households. Not surprisingly, when compared side-by-side, single-mother households ranked significantly higher. While this may not come as a shock to very many, subsequent arguments made by Heritage's Ryan T. Anderson just might:

"Redefining marriage further distances marriage from the needs of children and denies the importance of mothers and fathers. Redefining marriage rejects as a matter of policy the ideal that children need a mother and a father. Redefining marriage diminishes the social pressures for husbands to remain with their wives and children, and for men and women to marry before having children."

In other words, "redefining marriage" would create more of these single-mother households, since husbands will no longer feel obligated to stay with their wives after they have children. This would then lead to increased levels of poverty, much like the ones illustrated in the chart. Alvin McEwen was good enough to point out that “the Heritage Foundation offers no proof that marriage equality leads to single-mother families.” Furthermore, ThinkProgress also observes that...

"The study is based on census data and presents no comparable information about the experience of children in same-sex families. This follows a long trend of conservative groups citing studies about “fatherless” children — those being raised by single mothers — and trying to attribute those results to families headed by lesbian couples."

Conversely, I would posit that if we were rid of equality bans specifically and homophobia in general, there would be fewer broken homes that result from gay people being pressured by society - particularly in socially conservative areas - into "straight' marriages. I have read far too many stories where someone tried to play it straight, got married, and had kids, only to reach their breaking point and come out or get caught by a loved one. This anti-gay societal coercion has caused far too much heartache and it needs to be brought to an end.

You would think that organizations that are supposedly christian in nature and are supported heavily by Christians would adhere to the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" thing. Unfortunately they are yet more groups that are highly selective when it comes to the bible. Their biblical philosophy seems to be "read the parts that can be used to demagogue against people I don't like and forget the rest."

Would Your Child Pass the Predator Test?

Children of Same-Sex Couples Speak Out

Study: Sexual Orientation Isn't A Parenting Detriment

From the Williams Institute: 

Key findings include:

• Child age at placement— or the duration of time in the pre-adoptive context— did not emerge as a significant predictor of child adjustment (likely because all children in the sample were placed under 18 months).

• Parents’ level of preparation for the adoption was related to both externalizing and internalizing symptoms, such that parents who were less prepared reported more symptoms in their children.

• Parents’ depressive symptoms were also related to externalizing and internalizing symptoms in adopted children, such that more depressed parents reported more symptoms in their children. Depressive symptoms may compromise parents’ emotional availability and ability to parent effectively, which can contribute to child adjustment problems.

• Parents who reported more relationship conflict during the early transition phase reported that their children had more internalizing behaviors 2 years later.

• Family type (i.e., parent sexual orientation) was unrelated to children’s adjustment.

I'm guessing that this study is far more reliable than the Regnerus study (although that's an incredibly low bar). You can read the full report HERE.

A New Deadly Front For Bullies: Kids With Food Allergies

Children Raised By Same-Sex Couples Thrive

From The Age:

Children of same-sex parents are doing as well or better than the rest of the population on a number of key health indicators. 

That is the initial finding from the world's largest study on the children of same-sex parents, under way at Melbourne University. 

The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families collected data on 500 children nationwide, up to the age of 17.

~

''Because of the situation that same-sex families find themselves in, they are generally more willing to communicate and approach the issues that any child may face at school, like teasing or bullying,'' lead researcher Dr Simon Crouch said. 

''This fosters openness and means children tend to be more resilient. That would be our hypothesis.''

So in an ironic twist, the very people who think same-sex couples should not be parents are the very reason same-sex couples have better family cohesion.

Diary of Anne Frank is "Pornographic"

Two Gay Dads, Two Kids, A Normal Family

Father Defends Son Against Homophobe

Lots of parents could learn from this.

When Parents Discriminate Against Their Kids

I do not have children myself. However, what I do know from friends who are parents is that having kids and watching them grow into being their own person changes how a parent views things they once thought they had a handle on. While parents spend so much time and effort (and money) trying to teach their children they ways of the world, the children have the effect of teaching their parents. Often times, the child can open their parents‘ eyes to a perspective they may not have thought of as viable.

It was a major news story last month when Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) announced his support for marriage equality in the wake of his son Will coming out as gay about two years beforehand. The Senator is certainly not the first person to site a familial connection as the catalyst for supporting LGBT equality, nor will he be the last. Many people - be they public figures or private citizens - who once stood in opposition to equality viewed those issues differently when they could put faces on them as a result of someone close to them coming out of the closet. 

For many people, even such a personal connection as a gay family member is not enough to induce open-mindedness. Case-in-point, Representative Matt Salmon Sr. (R-AZ). Like Portman, Salmon has a gay son (named Matt Jr.). Unlike Portman, Salmon is utterly unmoved on marriage equality, even though he has had more time with an openly gay son than Portman. Even though it takes longer for some folks to come around than others on any given topic, it appears that Rep. Salmon feels no need to make a change regardless of how the policies he advocates negatively effect his own flesh and blood.

What does it say about a parent when they are unable or unwilling to alter their views for the sake of their child‘s freedom and equality under the law? The bottom line is that a parent who is comfortable with the institutionalized discrimination their child faces is a prime example of poor parenting. It is hard to fathom that some people have such an unwavering disregard for the well-being of those they profess to love. On the positive side, in terms of the quest for LGBT equality, evidence points to Representative Salmon being far more the exception while Senator Portman is far more the rule.

A Child's Letter to Justice Roberts on Prop. 8

A Father's Letter To His Gay Son

Study: Gay Parents As Good As Straight Parents

From Edge New England:

A study conducted by Cambridge University concluded that gay British parents are just as good as heterosexual parents.

The report, released by the British Association of Adoption and Fostering on March 4, chronicles the experiences of 130 families with adopted children. Of those, 49 are heterosexual couples, and 41 are gay and lesbian couples.

"Overall we found markedly more similarities than differences in experiences between family types," professor Susan Golombok, director of the Centre for Family Research and co-author of the report, told the Gay Star News.

Most people don't need a study to know this. There was another study that said quite the opposite, except it was revealed that that study had been manipulated to show unfavourable results that made gay couples look like bad parents. Between that revelation and this study, it has not been a good week to be against same-sex couple having kids.