Family Pride’s Blog

There has been so much in the news about the Larry Craig scandal. In case you have been living under a rock, he’s the Republican Senator from Idaho that was nabbed by police in a Minneapolis airport men’s room for alleged lewd conduct. Craig, who is married with three children, has now gone out of his way to assert that he isn’t gay.

The fact is, rumors of Craig being gay aren’t new. Allegations date back to the 80s. And Mike Rogers of BlogActive “outed” Craig last October.

There have been mixed reactions to this latest scandal even within our own community.

Loudest is the cry of hypocrisy; a cry that is certainly warranted given Craig’s staunch opposition to equal rights. He’s about as conservative as they get. Without fail, time and time again, Craig has voted against our families on important legislation.

Hypocrite or not, many people have sympathized with Craig - even in our own community. How many of us made fun of gays in high school so that we wouldn’t be picked on ourselves? How many of us had boyfriends or girlfriends so that people wouldn’t question our sexuality? It’s a time of inner conflict and fear. Granted, making a gay joke isn’t nearly as harmful as voting against ENDA, but still… a parallel does exist.

But there’s also a lot of outrage being directed towards the Minneapolis police department. These type of “bag the fag” operations have long been used to harass and shame gays. A lot of individuals and organizations have spoken out against these tactics.

And as gay parents, many of us are torn. We don’t want police singling out and targeting gay men. But on the other hand, we don’t want lewd behavior occurring in a place where our children might see it. It’s a tough call and there’s no easy answer.

With all the publicity and media hoopla surrounding this scandal, I think that it is important, as parents, to recognize the less obvious victims of the situation. Our hearts certainly go out to Craig’s three children in what must certainly be a difficult and trying time for them and their family.

We’re excited to bring this guest post by Cindy Rizzo, Director of Grantmaking Programs for the Arcus Foundation.

The battle for GLBT family recognition and full legal rights is being waged not just in courts and state legislatures. It is being waged on a daily basis in the media, in PTA meetings and in daycare centers throughout the country. These are the places where it has become important to assert, in the words of The Who, that “the kids are alright.” But beneath the magazine cover stories with glossy photos of smiling parents and beautiful children, and unspoken in conversations about grade-point averages and athletic or artistic talent, lies a growing worry that our deep, dark secrets—our kid might be a bed wetter or on ADHD meds or coming home red-eyed from smoking pot—could get out to the straight world. We fear that as soon as any of these secrets becomes widely known, somebody will say, “See, I knew this kind of thing would happen if they had children.”

So instead we keep up appearances and tell the world that we do a better job of raising kids because we worked so hard to have them in the first place. Parents become public relations agents armed with study data and anecdotes of children attending elite colleges or doing important community service work. As if parenting weren’t hard enough, we have this “image thing” to contend with as well.

A parallel effort is going on in the fight for marriage equality, where couples are forever talking about how long they’ve been together, how loving and secure their relationships are, and how they have persevered and worked hard to maintain their connection. No one mentions divorce, couples therapy, the dreaded “lesbian bed death” or infidelity. And there is not one word about domestic violence.

This pressure to be perfect places an enormous strain on our families and can prevent us from seeking important mental health, substance abuse or other services that could address the very problems we feel constrained from discussing. It leaves service providers unaware of the need to put certain programs in place. And it can prevent us from reaching out to friends and family for support.

Lately I’ve taken on a new crusade: to assert that GLBT parents are merely equal—no better and no worse than heterosexual parents. We have kids at Harvard and we have kids who dropped out of high school. We have the toddler who shares and the toddler who bites without provocation. We provide a loving, nurturing environment, and yes, some of us don’t. The equality argument leaves room for an admission of vulnerability and says to our families, “You are no worse off than anyone else, so go get the help you need to make it through the rough spots.” The alternative—suffering in silence—is really no way to raise kids.

Cindy Rizzo is the parent of two sons, ages 20 and 15. One attends a very good college and the other is studying Chinese. Both are on ADHD meds, one has been brought home by the police twice and one is not involved in any extracurricular activities.

We are thrilled to announce Family Pride’s first ever Family Poetry Contest! Starting today, we are accepting poetry submissions based on the theme, “love is….” We’re excited to offer a huge list of fabulous prizes generously donated by our contest sponsors. To learn more about the contest, read the official rules, browse the prizes or submit your family’s poem, click to www.familypride.org/poetry.

Jennifer Chrisler, our executive director, penned a letter to contest participants:

Poetry is a powerful tool for communicating truth. Poetry says what sentences cannot and speaks in a language that connects all people at the deepest level. With this in mind, we created our first ever Back-to-School Family Poetry Contest!

As the dog days of summer wind down, and homework, school lunches and football practice once again consume our lives, I encourage you to sit down with your family and collectively draft a poem about this year’s theme: “love is….” Talk about the contest at a family dinner, during a family meeting or your way to practice. But most of all, have fun with this contest!

The contest is open to all families, gay and straight, moms and dads, grandparents, parents, single parents and guardians, so take some time and submit your poem today! All the submissions will be included in a spectacularly designed poetry book that will be available for download free from our website.

We encourage you to submit a family picture with your poem. Entries will be accepted until our midnight deadline on September 19.

Visit www.familypride.org/poetry for more information.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A thousand words is a conservative estimate for this picture, snapped outside a Neighborhood Church in Pasadena.

The banner, which reads “LOVE makes a family. We support marriage equality!” was slashed. For the third time. It’s a reminder of tension between our movement and organized religion. It’s a reminder of the hate and homophobia that LGBTQ people face around this country and the world. It’s also a reminder that not all religious institutions are against us and our families. In many ways, this banner offers a beacon of hope: that more religious institutions will stand on the side of equality and justice.

In response to the incident, the Neighborhood Church of Pasadena released this statement:

Pasadena—Neighborhood Church of Pasadena will hold a peace rally on Sunday, September 9 at 1pm to officially designate the historic property as a “Hate-Free Zone” following the third slashing of the church’s Marriage Equality Banner.

Neighborhood Church invites the community to join members and staff as they wrap the sanctuary and entire adjoining campus in a hate-free ribbon in a show of unwavering solidarity and dedication to equality for all marriages and families, and to reinforce the church’s “Stand on the Side of Love” covenant.

The ribbon will also be signed and decorated with “pledges from the heart” declaring support for peace, equality and justice for the Gay and Lesbian community, the freedom to marry, and the belief that LOVE makes a family!

The banner was slashed on July 29, and following the peace rally, church officials plan to raise a new banner.

Hello everyone! My name is Daniel and I am writing to introduce myself as a new team member here at Family Pride. I hopped onboard this summer and have not had the chance to look back. I have been amazed (and yes, sometimes overwhelmed) by how hard the staff works everyday to do all that Family Pride does. I thought this would be easiest to do in a brief interview, and lacking an interviewer I have decided to interview myself.

Give us the basics?

The basics: I am a 6’4”, half-Aussie graduate of Bowdoin College (Bio Major, Gay and Lesbian Studies Minor) who is passionate about many social justice issues, especially LGBTQ equality.

Why Family Pride?

I think it is important to start this answer by saying family equality hasn’t always been important to me. Growing up in a conservative military town meant that I never (knowingly) met anyone whose family pushed the bounds of the “traditional” nuclear family very far. Without realizing it, I absorbed the sentiment that the “traditional” family represented an ideal and that deviations from that ideal meant the family became “dysfunctional.” Even arriving at Bowdoin and coming out, I secretly struggled with my desire to one day be a father and my internalized, homophobic fear of deviation. Then I met and began to baby-sit for two sets of lesbian mums. After observing first-hand how incredibly loving and caring these families were, my internal struggle came to rest only to be replaced by a controlled rage at the hoops LGBTQ-headed families had to jump through to simply build and protect themselves. So I am here at Family Pride for two reasons: 1) to help our families tell their stories to people like me who only need to be exposed to be convinced of their legitimacy and 2) to fight for that legitimacy to be legally recognized.

Favorite food?

Chicken pesto pizza from anywhere or anytime. Start your morning with a piece one day and find out what I mean. Delish.

Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jim Nuagle’s continuing anti-LGBTQ crusade just kicked things into high-gear at a recent press conference. To read the full story, check out this article on Good As You and read the excerpt below:

Others in attendance at the Naugle press conference included the newly formed Healthypublicplaces.com coalition, which, according to their own press release, is a consortium whose members come from such extremist groups as Americans for Truth, Concerned Women for America, Coral Ridge Ministries, Faith2Action, and Stephen Bennett Ministries. So basically you have a mayor demonizing gays as public sex-loving perverts, and joining arm-in-arm with some of our community’s most frighteningly antipathetic adversaries to do so. And the thing is, these aren’t even more mainstream opponents like James Dobson or Tony Perkins. No, we’re talking about the mayor of a heavily gay-populated city joining ranks with a fringe element of “pro-family” foes who truly seem to want us to be rendered “ex-gay” or else!! This is not only a sad development, but also a REALLY, REALLY SCARY one!

Florida is a scary place to be these days; it’s the only state with a flat out ban on adoption by gay parents - and now this! It’s salt in the wounds.

With Special Permission from Alex Blaze of the Bilerico Project, we are reproducing this powerful post in the Family Pride Blog to share with all of you.

“Why don’t you just demand your rights as an American instead of asking for Special Rights?”

Transgender Americans are not asking for special rights but for the same rights that other people have. The fact that transgender Americans are NOT treated equally in employment, housing, credit..etc. begs for legislation to stop discriminatory acts towards transgender people. Transgender Americans are not asking for rights that others don’t have. Transgender Americans are not asking to be treated better than everyone else or to have something that other Americans don’t have.

When I began transitioning on the job and I started exhibiting male characteristics, I was fired from my job and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I was told by every lawyer that I did not have a case because there was no law to protect transgender people from being fired in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

I was not fired because of real or perceived sexual orientation but I was fired specifically based on my gender expression. The Human Resource department was very careful in being explicit as to why I was being fired. My story of anti-transgender discrimination isn’t unique, there are hundreds just like it. So I ask you, where do we go to demand these rights? Where exactly was I supposed to go to demand justice for losing a job where I had spent years working holidays and weekends, sacrificing time that could have been spent with my family?

Demanding your rights as an American and not Special Rights for Hate Crimes Victims and Survivors. “A Murder is a Murder, shouldn’t we all be treated the same?”

Where was Robert Eads supposed to go to demand his rights when no doctor would treat him because he was a transman? As a result, he died with ovarian cancer.

Where was Chanelle Pickett supposed to go to demand her rights when she was brutally murdered by William Palmer, only to have her family, friends and a whole community watch him get sentenced to 2 years in prison, the maximum sentence for assault and battery?

Where was my aunt, Debra Forte supposed to go to demand her rights when she was beaten, strangled, stabbed three times in the chest, and every bone in her neck was broken by her killer, Michael Thompson? Thompson ran from the police and then turned himself in 2 weeks later only to be let out on bail. Where was my family supposed to go to demand compassion when the police came to my house and repeatedly referred to my aunt as “he,” even though she transitioned in 1961 and had been living as a woman for 34 years?

Where was my mother supposed to go to demand her rights when the police told her that her “brother” had been stabbed to death but when my brother and I arrived at the morgue to identify her body we were faced with the horrific reality that she had been beaten beyond recognition?

Where was the justice when we had to tell my grandfather that his child had been taken from him in a senseless act of violence, that his child was brutally murdered for no other reason than that she was a transsexual?

My grandfather died a few weeks later when his heart gave out.

Where was the justice when Michael Thompson plea bargained with the district attorney and was sentenced to 15 years in prison? The District Attorney was afraid that if they went for 1st degree murder that the jury wouldn’t be sympathetic to my aunt’s “lifestyle.”

My family was beyond angry that the district attorney didn’t go for 1st degree murder, and, after Chanelle Pickett’s killer was sentenced to 2 years (her killer was tried for murder 1), the district attorney called my mother to say, “See? We told you what would have happened.”

There have been 8 murders of transgender people here in Massachusetts and only 2 of those murders have been solved. In both instances the killers turned themselves in. There are now 380 transgender people (that we know of) who have died because of anti-transgender hatred or bias and more than half of those murders remain unsolved.

It would be nice to think that we are all human and therefore we should all be treated as human beings, that we should all be treated fairly and that all laws should apply to all of us. The simple fact is that we are not and we are dying as a result.

We are not disposable people and if Congress can’t pass a law that sends that message, they might as well just paint a target on our asses.

The following letter has been circulating in a few LGBTQ listservs and we thought it appropriate to share with our blog readers. It’s written by the mother of a gay child in Vermont, in response to a letter to the editor.

Many letters have been sent to the Valley News concerning the homosexual menace in Vermont. I am the mother of a gay son and I’ve taken enough from you good people. I’m tired of your foolish rhetoric about the “homosexual agenda” and your allegations that accepting homosexuality is the same thing as advocating sex with children. You are cruel and ignorant. You have been robbing me of the joys of motherhood ever since my children were tiny.

My firstborn son started suffering at the hands of the moral little thugs from your moral, upright families from the time he was in the first grade. He was physically and verbally abused from first grade straight through high school because he was perceived to be gay.

He never professed to be gay or had any association with anything gay, but he had the misfortune not to walk or have gestures like the other boys. He was called “fag” incessantly, starting when he was 6.

In high school, while your children were doing what kids that age should be doing, mine labored over a suicide note, drafting and redrafting it to be sure his family knew how much he loved them. My sobbing 17-year-old tore the heart out of me as he choked out that he just couldn’t bear to continue living any longer, that he didn’t want to be gay and that he couldn’t face a life without dignity.

You have the audacity to talk about protecting families and children from the homosexual menace, while you yourselves tear apart families and drive children to despair. I don’t know why my son is gay, but I do know that God didn’t put him, and millions like him, on this Earth to give you someone to abuse. God gave you brains so that you could think, and it’s about time you started doing that.

At the core of all your misguided beliefs is the belief that this could never happen to you, that there is some kind of subculture out there that people have chosen to join. The fact is that if it can happen to my family, it can happen to yours, and you won’t get to choose.  Whether it is genetic or whether something occurs during a critical time of fetal development, I don’t know. I can only tell you with an absolute certainty that it is inborn.

If you want to tout your own morality, you’d best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it. For those of you who reduce sexual orientation to a simple choice, a character issue, a bad habit or something that can be changed by a 10-step program, I’m puzzled. Are you saying that your own sexual orientation is nothing more than something you have chosen, that you could change it at will? If that’s not the case, then why would you suggest that someone else can?

A popular theme in your letters is that Vermont has been infiltrated by outsiders. Both sides of my family have lived in Vermont for generations. I am heart and soul a Vermonter, so I’ll thank you to stop saying that you are speaking for “true Vermonters.”

You invoke the memory of the brave people who have fought on the battlefield for this great country, saying that they didn’t give their lives so that the “homosexual agenda” could tear down the principles they died defending. My 83-year-old father fought in some of the most horrific battles of World War II, was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart.

He shakes his head in sadness at the life his grandson has had to live. He says he fought alongside homosexuals in those battles, that they did their part and bothered no one. One of his best friends in the service was gay, and he never knew it until the end, and when he did find out, it mattered not at all. That wasn’t the measure of the man.

You religious folk just can’t bear the thought that as my son emerges from the hell that was his childhood he might like to find a lifelong companion and have a measure of happiness. It offends your sensibilities that he should request the right to visit that companion in the hospital, to make medical decisions for him or to benefit from tax laws governing inheritance.

How dare he? you say. These outrageous requests would threaten the very existence of your family, would undermine the sanctity of marriage. You use religion to abdicate your responsibility to be thinking human beings. There are vast numbers of religious people who find your attitudes repugnant. God is not for the privileged majority, and God knows my son has committed no sin.

The deep-thinking author of a letter to the April 12 ‘05 Valley News who lectures about homosexual sin and tells us about “those of us who have been blessed with the benefits of a religious upbringing” asks: “What ever happened to the idea of striving . . . to be better human beings than we are?”

Indeed, sir, what ever happened to that?

As progressive LGBTQ people, we know the importance of breaking down gender stereotypes. We know that anyone, regardless of gender, should be able to be a pilot, a police officer or a nurse. We address our representatives in congress as congresspeople, not as congressmen. We cringe at the use of words like ma’am and sir and refuse to include them in our vocabulary.

Why, then, do so many of us insist in dressing our daughters in pink dresses, frills and yards of lace? Why do so many of us insist on painting our son’s room blue and our daughter’s room pink? Why do so many LGBTQ parents cart their daughters off to ballet while their sons enroll in soccer and little league? Simply, why does everything we’ve learned about gender fly out the window when it comes to our children?

Sure, it’s not everyone. I know some fantastic LGBTQ parents that are truly doing their best to raise their children in gender-neutral environments. In fact, one lesbian couple that I know didn’t hesitate to buy a doll house and Barbies for their five-year old son, as that’s what he wanted for Christmas. But a great many LGBTQ parents insist on raising their children in a very gendered world.

Why? I have a guess. The ability of LGBTQ parents is always being second guessed by mainstream America, court rooms and legislatures around the country. Sure, we know that the research says we are just as good a parent as anyone else, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to scrutinize our ability to parent.

If two male partners are shopping in a toy store with their son, and the child expresses interest in a doll, what do they do? What will the cashier think when two gay men are buying dolls for their son? Perhaps the cashier will think the myth is true: gay parents raise gay children.

I think we’re hypersensitive to the perceived scrutiny that we face, and thus, many of us go out of our way to raise “normal” children. Unfortunately, raising “normal” children involves sacrificing everything that we’ve learned about fighting gender stereotypes.

What’s a family nowdays, anyway?

A google search for the meaning results in a long list of obtuse and unsatisfying definitions. Few of the definitions express the real breadth and depth of the “American Family:” single parents, grandparents raising children, two moms, two dads, etc. These are all real families, and have been for decades, and it’s our job to remind people of that. These families have been the invisible majority for too long.

We know from the 2000 Census that family structures are very diverse. Talking in terms of “married men and women with 2.5 kids and a dog” actually leaves a majority of families out, not just our families.

Recently, I read a post in Constant Chatter about the very same topic. The author wrote:

So what is a family in 2007? …A family is (and always has been) an ongoing creation – if home is where when you have to go there, they have to take you in, then family are the people who take you in, no matter what. For some people, family is the nucleus of two parents and two or three children, living in a simple home. For others, family is a much larger, multigenerational structure, sometimes living together in a large dwelling, helping one another, getting into one another’s business, and raising generations of children together. For many city dwellers, family is one’s circle of friends, to whom we turn for everything from Sunday brunch to Passover Seders, acting as one another’s advisors in all things from childcare to divorce, and being there for one another in a world that can sometimes overwhelm and frighten even the toughest among us. With or without children, with one parent or two, gay or straight, we all cobble together families as best we can, because, in the end, there is something exceedingly human in our desire, our need, to be a part of a loving and supportive group that will be there for us. The world will change, our society will evolve, but our need for family, that is eternal.

The defintion of family will continue to evolve with our society, but the language of bedtime and bath time, hugs and homework bonds us all together as parents. At a speech in Dallas, TX, Family Pride executive director spoke about this universal bond of parenting.

In these coming days, months and years ahead as we continue on in our quest for equal justice, it is this that I hang on to. Because I fundamentally believe that the love of family is so universal, so powerful, that there will be no other choice for good hearted people all across this country to eventually realize that love is the same no matter who it is shared between…

To learn more about reframing the definition of family, download Family Pride’s OUTSpoken Speakers Toolkit.