Gay Dads' brains activate parenting neurons

This is really cool!

Having a baby alters new mothers' brain activity, researchers have found, and a new study adds the first evidence of such changes in the brains of gay men raising children they adopted through surrogacy. 

The men's pattern of brain activity resembles that of both new mothers and new fathers in the study....

The 48 gay fathers raising children with their husbands seemed to be both mom and dad, brain-wise. Their emotional circuits were as active as those of mothers and the interpretive circuits showed the same extra activity as that of heterosexual fathers'.

Sealed with a kiss

Like most gay couples, my wife and I are careful about when we kiss in public.  On the lips or not?  Long enough to make it clear that we are a couple?  Fortunately we live in an urban area that is fairly friendly, but still, we are cautious.  If we're in the gayborhood, it's different than if we're downtown.

Frank Bruni has a column this weekend about That Kiss:  the full on joyful kiss between NFL draftee Michael Sam and his slim swimmer boyfriend.  Not just a kiss between two men, but an inter-racial kiss as well.  Freighted with meaning, that exchange.  Bruni writes, 

From NBC news

And they’re still rare enough that the initial, internal reaction that I and many other gay people had to the way Sam clutched and kissed his boyfriend on national TV wasn’t exultation. It was alarm. Had he gone too far? Asked too much? 

.... I still sometimes feel panic when my partner, meeting me in a restaurant, gives me a perfunctory kiss on the lips. And yet I feel robbed — wronged — if I sense that an awareness of other people’s gazes and a fear of their judgment are preventing him from doing that. 

We shouldn’t be bound that way, and on the day of the pro football draft, in front of the cameras, Sam rightly declared that he wasn’t. He did so with a gesture at once humdrum and heroic, a gesture that connects everyone who has been in love and affirms what every love shares: physical tenderness, eye-to-eye togetherness. It was something to behold. It was something to hold on to.

Utah for Marriage (Video Sunday)

Five reason equality is winning

Great article in the WaPo identifies 5 reasons we are winning.

1. Rapid cultural shifts: more gay people coming out
2. An ally in the White House: the President evolved
3. A problem of overreach: if the other side had compromised, offering civil unions and legal rights, but they went out of their way to deny us any recognition
4. Religious influence rises — and falls: the rise of the nones
5. Belligerence

Perhaps the biggest obstacle facing proponents of traditional marriage was a negative image that they were never able to overcome. While chafing at comparisons to racism and Jim Crow laws, the matriarch of the traditional marriage movement, Maggie Gallagher, concedes that her side has been labeled as “hateful and bigoted.” ...

Some conservative activists say they brought it on themselves. 

“There was the evangelical belligerence, often, in the last generation that spoke, for instance, about the gay agenda, in which there was this picture, almost as though there is a group of super villains in a lair, plotting somewhere the downfall of the family,” Moore told a gathering of journalists in March. 

Conservatives also weathered a host of guilt-by-association charges, which were equally hard to dislodge. In Arizona, a bill that supporters said would protect religious freedom was conveyed as license to turn gays away from public businesses. Evangelical opposition to homosexuality was exported to Africa, which took the form of harsh laws to jail or even sentence to death known homosexuals. 

In short, it was no longer popular or politically correct to stand against popular culture and a swiftly changing popular opinion. 

“They showed no compassion for gay people, they didn’t offer any substitutes like protecting gay families or gay kids,” Rauch said. “That lack of compassion came through. It took a little while to register, but the American public does not like lack of compassion.”

Voices of Faith Speak Out on the ruling in PA

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Voices of Faith

Statement from the Rt. Rev. Sean W. Rowe, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northwestern Pennsylvania and Bishop Provisional of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem:

“Today is a joyful day for Pennsylvanians who believe as I do that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry in our state. These couples work hard, raise children, volunteer for good causes and pay taxes. Pennsylvania would be poorer without them, and I am pleased that Judge John E. Jones III has moved them one significant step closer to equality under the law.

“The Episcopal Church has struggled faithfully with the issue of same-sex relationships for more than three decades, and in that struggle most of us have come to understand that same-sex couples and their families are blessings to their communities and to their neighbors and friends. Like opposite-sex couples, their love draws them more clearly into fidelity to one another and service to the world. Like opposite sex couples, they are signs and sacraments allowing us to see the boundless love of God more clearly.

“I am aware that faithful Episcopalians in the Dioceses of Bethlehem and Northwestern Pennsylvania disagree with me on this issue. I want to assure them that our dioceses will remain places where people of good conscience can differ charitably and remain united in the hope and healing of Jesus Christ.

“After reflection and consultation, I will write to both dioceses with guidance for clergy who want to officiate at same-sex marriages. For today, I am grateful to live in a state that has taken a step toward justice.”

And Oregon. Prophetic words from the decision

...and a district judge has found that Oregon's marriage ban, which was undefended, is unconstitutional.  It's a beautiful opinion.  

My decision will not be the final word on this subject, but on this issue of marriage I am stuck more by our similarities than our differences. I believe that if we can look for a moment past gender and sexuality, we can see in thee plaintiffs nothing more or less than our own families. Families who we would expect our Constitution to protect, if not exalt in equal measure. With discernment, we see not shadows lurking in closets or the stereotypes of what was once believed; rather we see families committed to the common purpose of love, devotion, and service to the greater community.

Where will all this lead? I know that many suggest we are going down a slippery slope that will have no moral boundaries. To those who truly harbor such fears, I can only say this: let us look less to the sky to see what might fall; rather, let us look to each other…..and rise. 

How to talk to your kids about Michael Sam (video Sunday)

How marriage equality reinforces marriage

Not surprisingly, many of the gay and lesbian couples who are tying the knot have been together a long time. They already have forged a relationship and entwined their lives. And so when they marry, they are strengthening the institution.

Perhaps more powerful, this generation of gay couples is modeling an affirmative approach to marriage — and assigning a respectful significance to it — that straight couples often do not. How often, after all, are longtime heterosexual couples forced to ask (let alone answer): If you had to renew the lease on your marriage in midlife, would you do it? Would you legally bind yourself to this same person all over again? By embracing an institution that straight people take for granted, they are, to use Bradbury’s word, making a “purposive” decision rather than falling into an arrangement by default. 

Whether same-sex marriages will prove as stable as different-sex marriages (or more so, or less so) remains to be seen. In Europe, the dissolution rates of gay unions are higher. But here, according to Badgett’s work, the opposite appears to be true, at least for now. This doesn’t surprise Cherlin. “We have a backlog of couples who’ve been together a long time,” he says. “I’m guessing they’ll be more stable.” This first wave of midlife gay marriages seems to be celebrating that stability; they’re about relationships that have already proven durable, rather than sending off untested, fresh-faced participants in a fingers-crossed bon voyage. What stood between these couples and the institution of marriage wasn’t a lack of desire. It was the parsimony of the law. “Half of all divorces occur within first seven to ten years,” Cherlin points out. “These couples are already at low risk.”

Video Sunday: A story from France

Award winning video:

and....Arkansas?

Arkansas Times:

Circuit Judge Chris Piazza today invalidated the Arkansas ban on same-sex marriage and recognition of marriages legally entered by same-sex couples in other states.

An appeal is expected. The judge did not stay his ruling, though the state probably can be expected to request a stay. Reaction was quick, with Republican politicians first out of the box to decry the ruling.

Offices have closed so no marriages (yet).  A stay is requested.

From the ruling:

The Arkansas Supreme Court applied a heightened scrutiny and stnrck down as unconstitutional an initiated act that prohibited unmaried opposite-sex and sarne-sex couples from adopting children. The exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage for no rational basis violates the fundamental right to privacy and equal protection as described in Jegley and Cole, supra. The difference between opposite-sex and same-sex families is within the privacy of their homes.

This case is in state, not federal court. The ban on marriage passed with 75% of the vote.

Video Sunday: A message from the UCC (voices of faith speak out)

Quote of the day: Maggie Gallagher

Ardent equality opponent Maggie Gallagher left NOM a while ago (perhaps even she was put off by their ever more explicitly anti gay rhetoric) and concedes that her side has lost.  But she also recognizes that there is no way for her side to deal with the issue until they recognize the reality that people they love may be gay.  She writes, 

.... what I want you to take away, from the Charles Cooper story: Whatever we do, and whatever we say, we have to be willing to say it, as if to a beloved child of our own family, coming to us with a loving gay marriage. 

There is no line we can draw that pushes gay people “outside” and leaves us free “inside” to be angry, foot-stomping, and morally “pure.” 

We are all tangled up in Love with sin, our own and that of those we love. 

.....I could have a gay child. Anyone could have a gay child. Other people I know have gay children. Our children are beloved and yet do not necessarily put together the world the way we would have them. We have to love them anyway, across all the gaps. 

A movement able to withstand what is coming will have to face the Love problem first. 

Anything we say, anything we believe, we are going to have to be willing to say it not only with a generic gay person in the room, but as if to a beloved gay child.

The article goes downhill from there, but still... at some level she "gets" it.

So I will draw a distinction between Gallagher and other hate-promulgators.  She's got a lot of issues, and I obviously disagree with her profoundly,  but I do think she's the only one trying to grapple with a modus vivendi, however wrong I may find her.

And I think it is significant that she left NOM.