Family Pride’s Blog

The players: Lois (39 and the bio mom), Holly (30 and the non-bio mom) and Andrew (baby boy born 2/8/07). We have been together over 7 years, surviving a long distance relationship for 3 years and now live in Connecticut less than 10 miles from our respective childhood residences. We started trying to conceive in May 2005, one miscarriage and 7 attempts later, we ended up with the light of our lives! 

If I were to write about our family, I would describe us as this loving, fun and outgoing family. It’s a normal family, just like so many families with two parents and one kid. 
 
For the time being, it’s only a one-kid family. We’re seeing if we can keep this one thriving to the age of one, then we’ll discuss if we can handle more.
 
There are some people, however, who do not see our family as this wonderful environment that it is. Instead of getting angry (which we sometimes do anyway), we just set about living our lives sucking people in to see how much fun it is to be our friend, then pushing them graciously into acceptance by charming the pants off them.
 
We are not advocates in the full-time sense of the word, but we have made small waves here and there. Lois initiated a court battle for visitation of her non-biological twin daughters several years ago and now has visitation. While not generous is the time department, an unconditional bond between them is undeniable. We have also been in a few hometown newspaper articles from time to time, including the weddings in New Paltz, New York , of which we partook and our Sunday front-page above-the-fold color photo and article spread regarding our civil union ceremony on the first day they were legal in Connecticut. That sure made things easier to explain to high school classmates at our respective reunions.
 
How did we get here?
 
When I first met Lois, I don’t think starting a family was even within my comprehension of what our relationship would be. I was a waitress trying to decide find a path in life, she turned out to be my rock.
 
Within 6 months of our first date, I was in law school 3 hours away, coming into my own as a person and coming out to practically everyone I knew. It was invigorating!
 
With every person I was honest about who I was, I began to find more strength. I told my mom’s best friend before I could tell my own mother. Guess what? She already knew!  The responses from my family, friends, even my college sorority sisters (I was a Kappa Kappa Gamma if you could believe that) were so accepting and “oh please, we knew before you did!”
 
Both of our families are doing their best to accept and come to terms with our relationship. Unfortunately, Lois has hard a much harder journey with her family that took over 7 years to make the slightest progress. My family is doing okay. I do think my mother would like it if I were a little more “quiet” about it. But she’s dealing. 
 
I thought law school would be this conservative atmosphere of white collar, moneyed individuals that definitely would not “get” me. However, if I do say so myself, I think we turned out to be pretty darn popular. By third year of law school, I was the President of the student government, President of the gay and lesbian legal society and the team entry into the women’s home run competition at the intra-mural softball tournament. Lois was incredibly popular as well, due to her personality, of course, but also due to her generous cooking on her weekend visits!
 
We have many great friends and family members and maintain an open door policy, literally, in our home and everywhere we go. 
 
Over 7 years later, I look at our life and our family and cannot help myself from being amazed at our happiness in what we’ve created together.
 
It is our job to raise our child(ren) to be great members of our society. I will not be disappointed if my son is not a major league shortstop someday, but I think I will be disappointed in myself if we don’t teach him to respect people and bring something to the world that includes a life of love and acceptance of others.
 
We’re going to have a little vacation time in P-town during Family Pride’s family week with R Family Vacations this July. Hope to see everyone there!!!!
 
Here’s our family blog, a little solipsistic, yes. But we are trying to keep a journal to keep some things frozen in time and to just be able to laugh at ourselves from time to time. http://2mommies.wordpress.com

Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) is perhaps the most hotly debated topic today. It has an international reach, affecting tens of millions in the immediate and millions more to come. There is no one best opinion about CIR. The issues involved are too human for a one-size-fits-all approach, too specific to each individual, family and community affected. Likewise there is no one best political strategy when approaching reform—do we support Congress’s current efforts to alter (some say “improve”) the system, in the hopes that doing so will open doors to fixing the problems we see in immigration policy? Or do we, as an LGBTQ and ally community, oppose it because it doesn’t do nearly enough from the start to better the lives of LGBTQ immigrants, their families and friends?

I personally don’t have the answers to these questions. Neither does Family Pride. But as our organizational mission is to make sure that all loving families (living or connected to the United States) share equal access to the rights, responsibilities and benefits of being a family, we will continue to struggle with the immigration issues as the CIR debate grows.

For now, we can share with you some vital information about LGBTQ families directly touched by immigration and citizenship status. The following data has been pulled from a 2006 report by Immigration Equality. The report is entitled “Family, Unvalued: Discrimination, Denial, and the Fate of Binational Same-Sex Couples under U.S. Law.”

• As of Census 2000, 35,820 binational couples (meaning one partner has US citizenship while the other does not) live in the United States.
• These 35,820 binational couples equate to 6% of all identified same-sex couples in the US.
• Despite reform in the 1990s that struck down sexual orientation as a category by which potential immigrants could be judged, LGBTQ US citizens still can’t sponsor their long-term partners as family members.
• For more than fifty years, “family reunification” has been a primary goal of immigrant policy in the US. More than two-thirds of all legal immigration derives from family sponsorship. 
• The Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) not only prohibits one state from recognizing the same-sex unions of another; it also defines marriage for federal purposes as a union between a man and a woman, making it impossible for LGBTQ US citizens to advocate for spousal status of their same-sex partner.
• To reunite with their families, many non-US citizens attempt to live in the US on temporary visas, usually for 6 month periods. But temporary visas are not a viable option for the LGBTQ partners of US citizens. People on temporary visas must show that they do not have motivations to stay in the US passed their legal period. A romantic relationship with a US citizen is considered proof enough of intention to stay (and denial of the visa).
• The process by which non-LGBTQ US citizens sponsor their partners for entry into the US is relatively simple. Non-LGBTQ couples basically show a US consulate that they intend to marry and that they’ve met at least once before in-person. This declaration begins the process. There is no process for same-sex couples.
• Current CIR attempts would make it possible for an LGBTQ US citizen to be convicted of “smuggling” their life-long partner if the partner reaches undocumented status.
• Legal relationships to children with US citizenship do not grant immigrant parents legal status in the US, meaning they can be detained and deported, regardless of whether they parent children with citizenship.

These facts and figures give us just a glimpse into the ways immigration policy discriminates against LGBTQ families and tears them apart. “Family, Unvalued” could also easily have been called “Family Fugitives,” so desperate are the families with immigrant parents to avoid the system’s heavy hand.

There’s a separate bill in the US Senate right now, intended to stop this discrimination. It’s called the Uniting American Families Act. Help pass the bill here. For more on immigrant and LGBTQ families, read the full report: “Family, Unvalued.” To better equip yourselves to speak out on these issues and more, sign up for an OUTSpoken Families Toolkit, the Family Pride guide to advocating for family equality in your own communities. 

Leave a comment. Let us know what you think/feel about immigration reform and our families. If you are a family touched by immigration, share your story below.

Family Pride is honored to be a participant in and the sponsor of Mombian.com’s Blogging for LGBT Families Day. The list of participants is a long one and it attests to our power as a community and as a movement.

It also speaks to the changing faces and changing tools in the fight for family equality. Ten years ago, people would probably have thought that a “blog” was some sort of prehistoric amoebic creature. Today, blogs are sprouting up faster than bad summer sequels. According to Technorati:

there are over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.”

And just who is reading these blogs? Probably not who you’d think. A survery done by Blogads.com found that 72% of blog readers are 31 years old or older. An overwhelming majority of these readers rely on blogs for “faster news” and a “better perspective.” Wow. Could blogs be death knell for mainstream news media?

One thing is clear: we are now more connected than ever before. We can reach more people more efficiently and faster than ever, resulting in a network of people that respond almost instantaneously to news and current events.

Blogging for LGBT Families Day is harnessing this power to ignite change in our community. By making our families visible, we are challenging the radical right and the political rhetoric; by sharing our family stories, we are changing hearts and minds across this great country.

If you would like to participate in Blogging for LGBT Families Day, it’s not too late: click here. If you’d like to see the long list of participants, visit www.mombian.com.