Video Sunday: What Matters Most

Tylenol, Norman Rockwell, and a blended family....

Because nothing says "Christian love" like wishing a child's parents dead

Honestly, can they sink any lower in inhumanity?  From Think Progress: 

In a new blog post by IFI’s Laurie Higgins this week, the group takes on a new target: the children of same-sex couples, who Higgins expects would find “joy” in imagining their parents dead. 

....Her primary concern is that children should not ever see books about same-sex families, deeming any portrayal of a same-sex couple as  “homoeroticism” and “sexual perversion.” Instead, she suggests that librarians consider adding the following kinds of books (granting the premise that such books even exist):....

• Young adult (YA) novels about teens who feel sadness and resentment about being intentionally deprived of a mother or father and who seek to find their missing biological parents..... 

• Picture books that show the joy a little birdie experiences when after the West Nile virus deaths of her two daddies, she’s finally adopted by a daddy and mommy.

Children of gay couples happier and healthier

Oh, how inconvenient to the fans of Regnerus:

From the WaPo:

Children of same-sex couples fare better when it comes to physical health and social well-being than children in the general population, according to researchers at the University of Melbourne in Australia..... 

Crouch and his team surveyed 315 same-sex parents with a total of 500 children across Australia. About 80 percent of the kids had female parents and about 18 percent had male parents, the study states. 

Children from same-sex families scored about 6 percent higher on general health and family cohesion, even when controlling for socio-demographic factors such as parents’ education and household income, Crouch wrote. However, on most health measures, including emotional behavior and physical functioning, there was no difference compared with children from the general populatio

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'.

REgnerus fallout

Do you remember the Regnerus study, in which a sociologist purported to show that children of gay parents do worse?  Problem is, his definition of "children with gay parents" REALLY was "children whose parents broke up and one MIGHT have been gay."  He didn't compare kids from stable straight families, to kids from stable gay families.  And as any scientist knows, you really have to control for all those variables if you want to draw a conclusion.

An investigation by the journal that published the data found that it was unjustifiable,  while the author was in a rather--shall we say, ethically shaky relationship with the far-right group that funded the study.  The peer review was anything but objective.  The primary scholarly group in this field has roundly criticized the study as not worth the paper it is printed on.  Since then, Regnerus has been on the "circuit" arguing that Teh Gayz make terrible parents.  (You can read our coverage here).

Trying to get at how an article with such dubious merits got published, a reporter has filed for documents from the University of Central Florida, where the editor is.  UCF is vigorously trying NOT to reveal the documents.  Hmmmm, wonder why?

More at The Regnerus Fallout site.

Roman Catholic Bishops call upcoming Prop8 decision a "Roe v Wade" moment

One grows tired of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, who have their cottas in a twist over the impending SCOTUS decision on Prop8.  To refresh, the Court has been asked to determine whether removing the right to marry from lesbian and gay couples in CA is constitutional.

The USCCB has published an insert for Church bulletins claiming that overturning Prop8 would be the same as Roe v. Wade.  Amongst their complaints,

Every child has a basic, natural right to come from and be raised in the loving marital union of his or her own father and mother.

Now, this is the root of their objection and I would like someone to explain it for me, because it is a complete non sequitor.

How does recognizing marriage between gay couples have any effect on the "right" of children to be raised by a mum and a dad?

1) California has already given LGBT couples complete adoption and parenting rights, regardless of marriage.

2)  It is estimated that lesbian and gay couples in CA are raising over 37,000 children, either their own or adopted.

3) They will continue to raise their children regardless of whether marriage is legal.

4) Ergo, the only effect of denying marriage it to prevent those children, who exist now, at this very minute, from having the protections of married parents.

Interview with Dr Susan Love

Dr Susan Love and her wife, Dr Helen Cooksey, were recently interviewed in the NY Times. Dr Love is noted for her work on breast cancer, and was recently treated for Leukemia. I met them once, years ago, at a "Renaissance Weekend" in Santa Fe NM. They are really an inspiration.

Have you ever considered divorce?
Helen: No. It’s not like there’s one perfect person.
Susan: There are always challenges and there are times when you’re closer and less close but it all goes back to remembering you can’t change someone else. It took me 15 years to realize I couldn’t change Helen. I finally realized that the only person you can change is yourself – and if the relationship is worth it to you, you do it.... 

How has the illness affected the relationship?
Helen: It probably made us closer if anything. Susan was pretty needy, which was sort of nice because I like to feel needed. It was also nice to know where she was, because usually she’s traveling all over the place.
Susan: Helen was my most magnificent ally and champion. When I was having side effects –tired or hallucinating – she was out there yelling and screaming at someone, working to figure it out.
Helen: You have to deal with what’s presented to you. The most important thing is to focus on today and not worry about what could be or what could happen. We’re all immortal until we have a name of what can kill us.

sounds like a marriage! (Love and Cooksey have been together 30 years and  were married pre-Prop8).

My two moms: Video Sunday

Remember when Zach Wahls in Iowa testified powerfully in favor of marriage, as the son of a lesbian couple? His latest:

Inappropriate comparisons and special categories for gays

We discussed the deeply flawed about the deeply flawed Regnerus study on how broken households affect kids, and how Regenerus has interpreted this to mean "gay parents" even though he acknowledges that's not accurate.

We expect to see this used in the press and the courts to attack LGBT families and our children as well as our marriages.

(Turns out Regnerus is a hard core Evangelical with rather retro notions of women's sexuality as well.)

Does his agenda make a difference? From the Daily Beast:

Regnerus is also explicitly giving scientific credibility to parenthood-related arguments against gay marriage, which have played a large role in the political fight over the issue. Despite claiming that his research is descriptive of a previous generation and offers no causal explanation of the supposed discrepancy between gay and straight parents, Regnerus says outright that his study could reasonably lead to caution against legalizing gay marriage. It could lead to support for gay marriage to stabilize gay families, he writes, but it “may suggest that the household instability that the [study] reveals is just too common among same-sex couples to take the social gamble..."

Regnerus’s research doesn’t really “suggest” anything of the kind; he admits that it’s not clear sexual orientation had anything to do with inferior life outcomes of certain respondents in his survey or that his research has anything do with marriage at all. If we go by his own claims about the study, it has no bearing on what is at stake in the political debate over gay marriage and parenthood: whether gay couples who get married and decide to have children are any different from straight ones. But the way Regnerus is selling the research seems designed to bait pundits like Rod Dreher, who gave his post on the study the headline “Traditional Families Are Best for Kids” and touted it as evidence that “deconstructing marriage” will have dangerous consequences.

The last I'll say on this comes from Nathaniel Franks in the LA Times.

There is a larger point, however, that can be lost in the debate over how to read the data. There is no basis in the recent history of American social policy for testing the parenting skills of a class of citizens before we grant them permission to parent — or to marry. Given all the research on the hardships of children raised by single parents, there is still no movement to preemptively remove kids from broken homes after every divorce or to ban single people from having kids; such policies would be patently inhumane and unenforceable. Growing up in poverty increases the risk of a wide range of social and psychological ills, yet since the craze for eugenics died down, no one is proposing banning poor people from marriage or child rearing. And some ethnic and racial groups are statistically less likely to get or stay married, yet there is no ethnic litmus test for marriage or parenting — only a gay one.

Getting to know us can make the difference

During the Prop8 campaign, everyone complained about the horrendous ads.  Oh, not the ones from the other side, which were predictable, but the ones from ours.  No gay people in sight.  Our own side talking ABOUT us, not with us, and focused on "legality" and "unfairness".  Studies since then show over and over that focusing on legal issues is a turn off.  What makes a difference is the human connection.  

The LA Times has a story on this:

Wade Kach, left scrambling for a seat in a packed committee hearing last month, found a spot near the witness table. 

"I saw with so many of the gay couples, they were so devoted to one another. I saw so much love," said Kach, a member of the (MD) House of Delegates. "When this hearing was over, I was a changed person in regard to this issue." 

Putting a human face on same-sex marriage reflects a strategic change — one that can pack an emotional wallop and, as Kach's experience shows, win over the undecided or even opponents. 

The message "used to be one that focused on rights, parity in benefits," said Fred Sainz, vice president of communications and marketing for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group based inWashington, D.C. 

Since about 2008, Sainz said, same-sex marriage activists have begun "talking about love, honor and commitment."

Because it's about people.

Harvey Milk was right.  We have to come out.  Over and over again, we have to come out and tell our stories. Because we never know who is listening and what hearts can be changed.

The real threat to marriage isn't the gays: it's the economy

Frank Bruni writes in the NY Times:

In the intensifying debate over same-sex marriage, what I sometimes find hardest to understand is why so many opponents don’t see gay people’s longing to be wedded as the fundamentally conservative, lavishly complimentary desire it is. It says marriage is worth aspiring to and fighting for. Flatters it. Gives it reinvigorated cachet, extra currency, a sorely needed infusion of fresh energy.

….more than half of births to American women under 30 happen outside marriage. I doubt that a significant fraction of those babies’ parents are gay men or lesbians forbidden to wed. No doubt the huge majority are straight people who haven’t bothered to.

And those people are disproportionately at the lower end of the economic ladder, in red states, and otherwise "socially conservative". Marriage has, at some level, become a "luxury commodity" (see more about the trend in this NY Times story)

 As it turns out, some of the most socially traditionally views are people like me: blue state liberals, with an education, who believe that one should get an education before getting married, and get married before having children. I find the idea of bearing children out of wedlock (or for LGBT couples who can't wed, outside of a firm and committed relationship) to be deeply concerning. But rural and poor folks, not so much.

Indeed, the real threat to marriage isn't the dully conventional gay folks like me who value marriage and its meaning. It's not gay people who have separated straight procreation from marriage. it's the increasing distancing of marriage as a goal from the lives of poorer women, in which a child can belong to them in a way a husband does not.

Here's a discussion with Dr. Kathryn Edin, one of the authors of Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage. You'll note that marriage equality is no where in the discussion as a threat.

   There are three main ideas in the literature [about poor women and single motherhood]: One is that marriages aren’t happening because low-income men can no longer find stable jobs. The second one is that it is the welfare system breaking up the family by providing an alternative husband to the mom and discouraging marriage. And the third idea is that women are now doing so well that they don’t need men. By the end of the 1990s, it was pretty evident that none of them were plausible explanations for what was going on. 

[What we found is that] marriage is seen as sort of the ultimate thing you do in your 40s, once you’ve made it economically, [whereas] having children is a normal part of early adulthood. People were saying, “Well we want to marry, but first of all we’ve got to have that white picket fence.” They were interested in establishing their own economic independence so that when they went into a relationship they could claim equal power and they could have insurance if things went bad. That was very new. That was nowhere in the literature. And it makes sense in a situation where poor men do have more traditional sex-role expectations … [and] so many of them act in ways that are so deeply problematic, with the abuse and violence and infidelity.

She goes on to explain how divorce is viewed far more negativity than unwed motherhood in these communities.

Another interview with her in the Atlantic points out that the real threat to marriage is the economy.  

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. … 

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.” 

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. 

I do agree with the conservatives on one thing. The trends away from stable family units towards single motherhood are not ideal for children. However, it's not the fault of the gays. Studies show convincingly that  stable gay couples have excellent outcomes in raising their children, at least equal to stable straight couples.  

There's a common ground here, for us all to work for healthier families…. if only the other side were susceptible to facts as they are.

But they'd rather scapegoat the gays for the flaws of straight men (and women).  Kinda like Maggie Gallagher. 

(Cross posted at Friends of Jake)

What Prop8 Really Cost Us

GREAT blog from the HuffPo, by a gay dad about his family and their experience of Prop8.  Only difference with my family is that our kids were old enough to be angry.

Prop 8 passed that November. Elizabeth's second-grade class had been following the presidential election, so she knew about percentages and majorities. What she was unable to wrap her mind around was the fact that over half the voters in California thought we had no legal right to be a family. 

It was months before she told me about the nightmares she'd been having, dreams of people with yellow signs coming to our house with torches, trying set fire to our home. I wish I were making this up. Sadly, no. Thanks, National Organization for Marriage. To you I would say this: if, as your misleading campaign ads bleated for months, you main goal is to protect children, how could you possibly do this to mine? 

We got married that very warm, first possible evening in June, not to be part of history or to make some political statement, but because we're a family and want what's best for our kids. Luckily, California's Supreme Court subsequently held that our marriage, and the other 18,000 marriages performed during those five months, had been entered into in good faith and could not be evaporated by a vote. But what about the other families, the ones who weren't lucky enough to marry when they had the chance? 

Even with Tuesday's court ruling finding Prop 8 unconstitutional, with the inevitable stays and delays as the case likely works its way to the Supreme Court, for months and probably years we'll have California kids standing on playgrounds wondering why they can't have married parents like their friends.

Perhaps Ms Gallagher would like to explain that?

Voices of Faith: An open letter to homophobic Christian parents at Christmas

I'm lucky that my parents immediately welcomed my partner (now wife) into our family life. But lots of people aren't so lucky. Here's a letter by an MCC minister:

To be Christian means to seek to be like Jesus, to follow His teachings and example, right? That's what makes your rejection of your LGBT children and their partners so richly ironic. The good news is that the upcoming holiday season provides you with a perfect opportunity to take a step toward turning things around....

Of course, my mother wanted me to come “home” for Christmas – me and my children. But my partner was not welcomed. ...I desperately searched for some kind of compromise. ...She was so genuinely convinced that she was obliged to "take a stand" about my life and my relationship -- that she would not meet me any fraction of the way. I had to choose. And the "wrong" choice would break her heart.

But here's another great irony in all of this, my partner -- the very same person that my mother refused to allow to sit and break bread at her table on Christmas Day -- insisted that I go to my Mom's house for Christmas.....She said she didn't want my mother to have a heavy heart on Christmas Day because of my absence.

"If Jesus were the head of our family, sitting there at the head of the table Christmas Day, how would He have handled this?" Based on everything I've read about Him, every encounter He had with His society's "undesirables," every word that I've read that He said and what He oh-so-conspicuously did not say -- not one word about homosexuality -- I believe that when my partner dropped me and my kids off in front of my mother's house, He would have said to my partner, "Come on in. Have some dinner."

That's what I wish my mother had been willing to do. It will never happen now because my mother has passed away. I’ve gone from spending Christmas with my mother and without my partner to spending it with my partner and without my mother. The opportunity for me to spend Christmas -- or any time -- with the two most important women in my life in one room is gone.

If you are reading this, it’s not too late for you to give your son or daughter that gift. You don't have to understand his or her intimate relationship. You don't have to approve. Just hear this: Jesus clearly never saw spending time in the company of “sinners” and “undesirables” as condoning their behavior. Even He did not see Himself as too “holy” to hang out with them. So you, too, can be kind to your gay children and their partners without “condoning” anything you believe to be wrong. You can just love your child, and be open to the possibility of growing to love someone else who loves your child. It is not too late for you to give him or her that precious gift. Christmas is coming. Invite your child -- and his or her partner -- to come on in and have some dinner. Do that, because, -- in your heart -- you must know that Jesus would. Just be like Jesus. He is, after all, the One whose birth we will celebrate.

Children deserve loving parents

The main argument that the right wingers use these days to oppose marriage equality is "children deserve a mother and a father."  This argument is specious and illogical and I am really tired of it.  It makes no sense.

Do they think that gay people will stop raising children if they can't marry?  Of course we won't.  WE already have children and they aren't magically whisked away if we aren't married.

Do they think that gay people can't adopt or foster children if they can't marry?  California's prop8 said nothing about children or adoption. No anti-marriage amendments touch this.  Gay couples in California and many other states continue to provide loving homes for foster children and adopted children despite the bias against us.  Banning marriages between gay people has nothing to do with adoption.

Do they think that gay people will stop having their own children if they can't marry?  We already have biological children, from previous (straight) marriages, or by other means, such as surrogacy--all perfectly legal, and unaffected by marriage.

Do they think that gay people who want children and aren't allowed to marry, will turn straight?  To which one answer is, would they want a gay man to marry their daughter for the sole sake of breeding?

Do they think that straight people will stop having children if gay people marry? Obviously the species is in no peril, since straights outnumber gays by 10:1 at least!  And remember, nearly all gay kids had straight parents.

The fact is that by denying civil marriage to us, they willingly put our children at risk.  Marriage between parents is good for kids.  If they cared about children, they'd care about ALL children.  

And the fact is that that civil marriage is not linked to childbearing, nor to adoption:  they are completely separate issues.

Now, if you want to use that argument to try to forbid gay couples from adopting, that would be logical.  Wrong, but logical.  But as I've shown, it has no bearing on the question of whether two faithful and commited people who happen to be of the same sex, should be able to marry.

Report details how lack of marriage hurts kids of gay parents

From the AP:[

A report] Compiled by an alliance of advocacy and child-welfare groups, ... summarizes how laws and social stigma create distinctive challenges for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender families.

"There are myriad ways that our families are discounted by government at all levels, and children are hurt the most," said Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Equality Council, one of the three groups authoring the report. ....

Among the barriers and inequities they face, as detailed in the report:

—Many government safety net programs use definitions of family tied to marital status which may exclude same-sex partners.

—Because of lack of legal recognition for their unions, gay and lesbian parents can face heavier tax burdens, higher costs for health insurance, and diminished financial protections in the event of death or disability.

—When same-sex parents separate, one parent may lose custody or visitation rights, even in cases where he or she had been a child's primary caregiver.

...Many of the obstacles and inequities outlined in the new report would be addressed if same-sex marriage — now legal in six states and Washington, D.C. — were legalized nationwide and recognized by the federal government. However, the report includes numerous recommendations for less sweeping changes that would benefit children with gay parents

See the full report, All Children Matter

Military families mount legal challenge to DOMA

From the WaPo:

Gay and lesbian troops and veterans plan to file suit Thursday challenging the constitutionality of the federal ban on gay marriage and federal policy that defines a spouse as a person of the opposite sex....

The suit also challenges provisions of federal code regarding spouses that lawyers said bar gay couples from accessing a range of benefits provided by the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs, including military identification cards, access to bases, recreational programs, spousal support groups and burial rights at national cemeteries.

Massachusetts Army National Guard Maj. Shannon McLaughlin, 41, and her wife, Casey, 34, are serving as lead plaintiffs in the suit, which also includes five other troops and two career Army and Navy veterans. ...

Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said Wednesday that officials are “engaged in a careful and deliberate review” of whether some benefits could be extended to same-sex partners.

“Service members continue to have some benefits for which they may designate beneficiaries, regardless of sexual orientation,” Lainez said in an e-mail. But eligibility for other benefits is restricted by DOMA, she said.

At Veterans Affairs, spokesman Josh Taylor said department lawyers plan to review the case once it is filed.

Once DADT finally fell (and there wasn't much noise when it finally went), it made the repeal of DOMA inevitable. You cannot expect someone to risk their life for the country while refusing support to their families.

Why it matters: Houston judge says husband can't be with kids

This one's a doozy.

A Houston judge entered an order on June 24 which prohibits a father from leaving his children alone with any man they aren’t related to “by blood or adoption.” Because there was no allegation of abuse in the case, family law practitioners say the order is an unheard of infringement on the rights of parents and a judicial condemnation of the fact that the man, William Flowers, is not only gay but married to his partner, Jim Evans.

.... So if, for example, William wants to visit his mother in the hospital (where she’s been for several weeks), he can’t leave his kids at home with his husband. As written, the injunction also prohibits male doctors, teachers and pastors from being alone with the children.

Attorneys who practice family law in Texas point out that in cases of abuse, it is common for courts to prevent children from being alone with specific people. But those same lawyers say that they’ve never heard of a case in which a step-parent or long-term partner is permanently enjoined from being alone with his or her step-children when abuse is not even alleged, let alone proven. No lawyer consulted for this story has ever heard of an order which prohibits children from being left alone with an entire gender.

That's Texas, home of your would-be next president.

Seriously, this is so wrong on so many levels. Apparently, the judge has no problem with William, but assumes that any man around the kids must be a pedophile? Of course he wouldn't treat William's WIFE that way, if William were straight. Can you imagine him saying, "you can't leave your kids alone with any woman"?

I'm just so tired of this crap from the bigots, the haters, and the ignorant.

The REAL threat to marriage

While NOM and others fulminate against LGBT couples marrying, they might do better to look at the horrific effects that the recession has on marriage (not to mention conservative policies that disadvantage the poor and jobless).

From the Atlantic, last year but still current:

[J]oblessness corrodes marriages, and makes divorce much more likely down the road. According to W. Bradford Wilcox, the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, the gender imbalance of the job losses in this recession is particularly noteworthy, and—when combined with the depth and duration of the jobs crisis—poses “a profound challenge to marriage,” especially in lower-income communities. It may sound harsh, but in general, he says, “if men can’t make a contribution financially, they don’t have much to offer.” Two-thirds of all divorces are legally initiated by women. Wilcox believes that over the next few years, we may see a long wave of divorces, washing no small number of discarded and dispirited men back into single adulthood.

Among couples without college degrees, says Edin, marriage has become an “increasingly fragile” institution. In many low-income communities, she fears it is being supplanted as a social norm by single motherhood and revolving-door relationships. As a rule, fewer people marry during a recession, and this one has been no exception. But “the timing of this recession coincides with a pretty significant cultural change,” Edin says: a fast-rising material threshold for marrying, but not for having children, in less affluent communities.

Edin explains that poor and working-class couples, after seeing the ravages of divorce on their parents or within their communities, have become more hesitant to marry; they believe deeply in marriage’s sanctity, and try to guard against the possibility that theirs will end in divorce. Studies have shown that even small changes in income have significant effects on marriage rates among the poor and the lower-middle class. “It’s simply not respectable to get married if you don’t have a job—some way of illustrating to your neighbors that you have at least some grasp on some piece of the American pie,” Edin says. Increasingly, people in these communities see marriage not as a way to build savings and stability, but as “a symbol that you’ve arrived.”

Childbearing is the opposite story. The stigma against out-of-wedlock children has by now largely dissolved in working-class communities—more than half of all new mothers without a college degree are unmarried. For both men and women in these communities, children are commonly seen as a highly desirable, relatively low-cost way to achieve meaning and bolster identity—especially when other opportunities are closed off. Christina Gibson-Davis, a public-policy professor at Duke University, recently found that among adults with no college degree, changes in income have no bearing at all on rates of childbirth.

“We already have low marriage rates in low-income communities,” Edin told me, “including white communities. And where it’s really hitting now is in working-class urban and rural communities, where you’re just seeing astonishing growth in the rates of nonmarital childbearing. And that would all be fine and good, except these parents don’t stay together. This may be one of the most devastating impacts of the recession.”

What was that about "every child deserves a mother and a father"?

How will the death of DADT affect DOMA?

One of the real remaining issues with allowing open service in the military is, surprisingly, marriage.  The military traditionally takes care of the families of service people.  But the bigotry expressed by DOMA, the so called "defense of marriage act", prevents that.

Great article in the NY Times this weekend lays it out

[W]ith the final repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the coming months — and with the recent legalization of same-sex marriage in New York and the possibility of other states’ following suit — many advocates expect the number of gay and lesbian married couples in the military to rise significantly.

As those numbers grow, unequal treatment of same-sex married couples will become a source of resentment and poor morale, advocates for gay troops assert.

...Eileen Lainez, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, said the department was studying whether smaller benefits, like free legal services, could be extended to same-sex spouses. But she said there would be “no change” in eligibility for major benefits like housing and health care when “don’t ask, don’t tell” goes away.

“The Defense of Marriage Act and the existing definition of ‘dependent’ in some laws prohibit extension of many military benefits to same-sex couples,” she said.

...One currently serving Army officer who married her same-sex partner in Massachusetts said the end of the ban would provide a huge emotional release, allowing her for the first time to talk to her fellow soldiers about her wife and two children.

But she also considers it unfair that her wife will be unable to receive health or dental care on her base, buy life insurance subsidized by the military or shop at the base commissary, grocery store and gas station, where goods are typically cheaper.

Their family, however, will be eligible for base housing because they have dependent children. But same-sex married couples without children will probably not get such housing, experts say.

“I want to be like everyone else,” the officer said. “I don’t think my family should be entitled to anything less than the people I’ve served with here and overseas.”

Imaging what it will mean to be told, as an out gay servicemember, that you can't give your spouse health insurance?

What will it mean in public perception, when the carefully folded flag from the coffin is given to a same-sex spouse?

The racial integration of the military helped drive integration nation-wide. Service members who complete their service go home, after all. (It may have been helped somewhat by the draft, which made sure that serving was widely and democratically experienced. Our professional military is quite distant from most of us now, a separate class.)

 DOMA is and remains a purely cruel and vicious law.  The families of gay servicemembers deserve the same treatment as the families of straight servicemembers. 

Update:more on the inequities here.

Same-sex partners can be listed as the person to be notified in case a service member is killed, injured, or missing, but current regulations prevent anyone other than immediate family — not same-sex spouses — from learning the details of the death. Same-sex spouses also will not be eligible for travel allowances to attend repatriation ceremonies if their military spouses are killed in action.

Can you imagine anything more insulting than not being told how your spouse died?

END DOMA NOW.

"Children deserve a mother and a father"

I'm getting so tired of that meme, which is a standard now in the anti-equality arsenal. We saw it again in Abp Timothy Dolan's attack on equality legislation in New York. But doesn't make any sense. Amy Davidson, in the New Yorker, lays out why (spaces added for ease of reading):

That is, speaking very charitably, a non-sequitur. There are all sorts of reasons children are raised in families that don’t include “a mom and a dad”; Dolan must know that. Same-sex marriage isn’t one of them. 

Maybe Dolan believes that divorce, in any circumstance, violates a child’s rights; how about children adopted by gay parents—does he believe that their rights would be protected by lingering in foster care, bounced from non-home to non-home? 

Would he prefer that those born to gay or lesbian parents had never existed? If so, that is a pretty tangled position for a Catholic (or even for a writer of North Korean communiqués). 

Does he think that children should be taken away from gay parents (or single widowed parents, for that matter) who have loved them all their lives to be given to any heterosexual, or even just heterogeneous, couple? 

And even if he agrees with all of that, what on earth does it have to do with same-sex marriage? Allowing two people who love each other to marry will not stop people who don’t love each other from separating, or from getting married in the first place. Neither marriage nor love is a scarce resource. And yet Dolan talks as though there were thieves in his house.

If one’s only interest in all this is the rights of children, then gay marriage is really an imperative. (There are other factors, too, of course, that don’t depend on children: respect, fairness, kindness.) Marriage can protect children—legally, financially, socially—and same-sex marriage will give more parents more ways to protect more children. Making that possible is surely the right thing to do.