Free Republic

Many gays with kids face the same challenges of straights with kids. How do you teach children morals? How do you get gum out of the dog’s hair? How do you teach children manners? How do you get your son or daughter into Harvard, Notre Dame, the Olympics or NBA Basketball? But a few of the challenges arise only in that particular environment of the gay man or men raising one or more straight sons. Boys grow up, and sometime between the period of cute adolescence and mature adulthood, there is that time when a son is a rebellious teenager....

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Tennessee has become the latest state to assure continued taxpayer funding of faith-based foster care and adoption agencies even if those organizations exclude LGBTQ families and others based on religious beliefs. Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed the bill Friday without fanfare or an official announcement, making it the first law to be implemented in Tennessee this year. Previously, Lee said he endorsed the law because he believed defending religious liberty “is very important.” The Republican has often cited his Christian faith throughout his first term as governor. However, under the new law, current adoption practices in...

‘Gold standard’ study’s striking findings: children of heterosexual parents happier, healthier The most scientifically credible studies show that children of heterosexual parents fare better on numerous indicators of personal well-being than children of homosexual parents. Authored by Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, the study was published in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research. Children of lesbian mothers are nearly 12 times (≅ 1200%) as likely to say they were sexually touched by a parent or adult as those raised in intact biological families. Asked if they had ever been raped, 31...

Fresh off their biggest legal victory, gay rights supporters began to expand their efforts beyond same-sex marriage to a broad push to rewrite civil rights law and extend protections to other personal and financial actions. A liberal coalition spanning gay rights groups and traditional African-American leaders turned its attention to a new legislative bid to outlaw discrimination against homosexuals in employment, housing, financial dealings and other regular actions not protected under the Supreme Court's ruling declaring same-sex marriage a constitutional right. "You can be married on Saturday, post your pictures on Instagram on Sunday and fired from your job on...

HuffPost Gay Voices did their usual happy dance Thursday over a new Tylenol commercial that prominently featured gay and lesbian couples alongside real families and real couples. Part of their new #HowWeFamily campaign, which supposedly "aims to celebrate the diversity of modern families," the commercial features a lesbian couple posing for a prom photo and two homosexual men posing as fathers while holding a baby. "When did you first fight to be considered a family?" a voiceover asks. "When you fell in love? When you got married? When you had kids? Family isn't defined by who you love, but how."...

Former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell was ready to adopt her second child, until she got some unexpected news from the doctor. That’s when the birth mother, Jami Weaver, said the child was rejected. Jami Weaver claims that the agreement fell through when she learned her unborn child was diagnosed with gastroschisis (a congenital deformity where the bowel protrudes through the abdominal wall) last summer. 'Rosie told me she could not handle having a special needs child,' she said. Perhaps if she’d have done some research, O’Donnell would have discovered that babies with gastroschisis have a 90 percent survival rate,...

A gay man has spoken of his joy after his mother gave birth to his child, following a surrogate pregnancy. Anne-Marie Casson, 46, gave birth to baby Miles via C-section, after a donor egg was fertilised with the sperm of her 27-year-old son, Kyle. Kyle, 27, from Doncaster, South Yorkshire is believed to be the first single man in the UK to have a child through surrogacy, and also the first man to use his own mother as a surrogate host. But after a High Court ruling, he can now become the child’s legal father, despite also legally being the...

Dear Justice Kennedy, June is nigh, and with it will comes your ruling on the most contentious political issue of our time: marriage. I write because I am one of many children with gay parents who believe we should protect marriage. I believe you were right when, during the Proposition 8 deliberations, you said “the voice of those children [of same-sex parents] is important.” I’d like to explain why I think redefining marriage would actually serve to strip these children of their most fundamental rights. It’s very difficult to speak about this subject, because I love my mom. Most of...

Two gay dads are shocked that a religious private school in Tennessee has refused to accept their children for enrollment. Yahoo reports that Brian Copeland and Greg Bullard applied to the school after a friend said he believed the school would accept their family arrangement. Copeland further explained the situation on his Facebook page. “We chose this school because of its rigorous faith-based K-12 academics and extra curricular activities; and, a friend with a son there asked them if a family like ours would be allowed and was told yes. After a phone conversation, fully disclosing we are a two-dad...

As Christians around the world got ready to contemplate the innocence of the child Jesus, last week the Russian Orthodox Church took on a UNICEF paper that says children have LGBT rights.The Patriarch’s Commission on the Family of the Russian Orthodox Church released a scathing statement criticizing a UNICEF position paper that urges countries to protect LGBT rights because, it says, it is in the “best interests of children.” The Commission turns the tables on UNICEF and says: “Placing children to be raised by same-sex couples is a gross violation of the rights and interests of a child.”The Orthodox Commission...

A Casualty of Love: the daughter of two moms speaks out. (Guest Post) Askme / 2 weeks ago I was raised by my biological mother and her same-sex partner. I have only a few fuzzy memories of my father: a phone call here and there, his deep and unfamiliar voice wishing me a happy birthday, and a dim picture of the way the furniture had been arranged in his house. I have less than a handful of pictures of him. My mom and dad were married for a short time but she left him when I was too young to...

You may often see articles in the media claiming that "research has shown" that children of same-sex couples are thriving, in fact are physically and psychologically doing just as well as, or even better than, children of couples who are -- let me use this currently underused word -- normal. Are these works reliable? In July such a study, carried out in Australia, was much trumpeted by that pillar of "progressive" thinking, the Washington Post, under the headline "Children of same-sex couples are happier and healthier than peers, research shows". Researcher Simon Crouch and his team at the University of...

In 1964 Bob Dylan wrote the amazing classic tune, “The times they are a changing”. Some of the words went like this: “The line it is drawnThe curse it is castThe slow one nowWill later be fast…Rapidly fadin'And the first one nowWill later be lastFor the times they are a-changin’." Fifty years after Dylan’s riveting verses, special interest groups’ claims about both the nature and dynamics of marriage are changing more dramatically than any of the social phenomenon of the 60’s. For years, the argument for deeply altering an ancient institution was framed entirely in terms of individual “rights.” We...

Children of same-sex parents enjoy better levels of health and wellbeing than their peers from traditional family units, new Australian research suggests. In what they described as the largest study of its type in the world, University of Melbourne researchers surveyed 315 same-sex parents and 500 children about their physical health and social wellbeing. Lead researcher Doctor Simon Crouch said children raised by same-sex partners scored an average of 6 per cent higher than the general population on measures of general health and family cohesion. . . . Ms Phillips also questioned the the objectivity of the study's lead researcher....

The children of same-sex couples have a tough road ahead of them—I know, because I have been there. The last thing we should do is make them feel guilty if the strain gets to them and they feel strange.

It's now official policy in Massachusetts: Adults holding traditional values will no longer be allowed to adopt or be foster parents. On May 15, 2013, the Boston Bar Association held a forum with the Mass. Department of Children and Families (DCF) and the Mass. Commission on LGBT Youth. The DCF speakers confirmed that they are "weeding out" adoptive and foster parents who are not willing to wholly accept and support LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender) self-identification by a child in their care. Erika Rickard, Vice Chair of the Mass. Commission on LGBT Youth and herself a foster parent, called...

Never mind! Paul Ryan has changed his view on adoption by same-sex partners, he told a town-hall audience in Wisconsin on Monday. In 1999, Ryan voted against gay couples, but now says he has reversed course on the issue. “I’d vote differently these days,” he said. “I do believe that if there are children who are orphans who do not have a loving person or couple, I think if a person wants to love and raise a child, they ought to be able to do that.” On same-sex marriage, he says he’s still opposed.

Leave it to my state of California to head off in radical and expensive directions. Legislation has been filed that would require group insurance to cover gay and lesbian infertility treatments just as they do heterosexual. But, as I note elsewhere, AB 460 isn’t limited to a finding of actual infertility. Nor does it require that gays and lesbians have tried to conceive or sire a child using heterosexual means, natural or artificial. Rather–as with heterosexual couples–merely the inability to get pregnant for a year while having active sexual relations is sufficient to demonstrate need for treatment, meaning if the...

TOPEKA, Kan. -- A sperm donor in Kansas is fighting a state effort to force him to pay child support for a child conceived through artificial insemination by a lesbian couple. William Marotta, 46, of Topeka said he is "a little scared about where this is going to go, primarily for financial reasons," The Topeka Capital-Journal (http://bit.ly/132b7Ji) reported Monday. When he donated sperm to Angela Bauer and Jennifer Schreiner in 2009, Marotta relinquished all parental rights, as well as financial responsibility for the child. When Bauer and Schreiner filed for state assistance this year, the state demanded the donor's name...

Europe’s highest court on human rights will decide if a lesbian can adopt her partner’s child, in this case stripping the father of his parental rights to his son. The case is very simple according to Gregor Puppinck of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ). “The two female partners want to oust the father and, since the law does not allow them to do so, they claim it is discriminatory,” Gregor reported in Turtle Bay and Beyond, C-FAM’s blog. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will hear the case X and others v. Austria...