Monday, April 13, 2009

Monday afternoon news briefs

Ugh - talk about your bad days. I had a huge problem today which kept me from posting my midday news briefs. So without futher adeiu, here they are.

Tomorrow, I should be back to normal. By the way, I have not received an answer from NOM regarding my email.

Opponents to Day of Silence still unhappy - Even after his colossal failure in trying to undermine the Day of Silence last year, Ken Hutcherson comes back to try again.

Anti-gay bait and switch - How ironic that NOM likes to play the black and lgbt communities against one another. And it turns out they might not be so pro-minority community themselves.

Concerned Women for America in debt, losing money - Kismet is a bitch. And I love me some bitches.

Gay, Lesbian Families Headed To W.H. Lawn - Very appropriate when considering today's earlier blog post.

Clergy in the crosshairs - More lies about hate crimes legislation courtesy of One News Now
Questions that the National Organization for Marriage will never answer

We laugh at the recent blunders by the National Organization for Marriage, but we shouldn’t let our amusement cloud our anger over the entire situation.

And personally I have been miffed all weekend.

I am so tired of seeing groups like NOM bogart the concepts of marriage and family. I respect their First Amendment rights but I hate their inferences that our desire to have relationships and families are derived from selfishness.

The desire to have a relationship and a family is natural and it should never be determined by sexual orientation.

I’ve developed a few questions about this that I’ve emailed to NOM. I doubt they will answer these questions, but it helps my heart to let them know how I feel about their belief that they own the definition of family.

Dear NOM,

According to the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, studies estimate that between 1 and 9 million children in the United States have at least one parent who is lesbian or gay. There are approximately 594,000 same-sex partner households, according to the 2000 Census, and there are children living in approximately 27 percent of those households.

According to 2000 Census analyses by the Urban Institute and Human Rights Campaign, same-sex couples raising children live in 96% of all counties nationwide in the United States.

According to the Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Black Justice’s analyses of 2000 Census data, there are almost 85,000 same sex couples in the United States who are African-American. Three in five Black female same-sex households (61%) are comprised of mothers living with at least one child. Black lesbian couple households are almost as likely as Black married opposite-sex couple households to include children (69%).

I’ve read your talking points and you don’t even address these families. Since you claim that your concerns have to do with the definition of marriage and, by extension, family, I have a few questions. I would appreciate very much if you would make an attempt to answer them.

Doesn’t the language and semantics you use in fact create a caste system for American families?

When your leader Maggie Gallagher gets on talk shows why does she attempt to divert the conversation from the proven fact that the raising and care of children is not necessarily a heterosexual two-parent function?

Why do you repeat jargon about the studies that show that families with mothers and fathers are the best place to raise children when you know fully well that those studies never looked at same sex households?

You say that same sex marriage will force schools to teach that gay couples are just as good for raising children as heterosexual couples. Would you directly tell a child raised by a same sex couple that he or she is inferior because of not being raised in the “right environment?”

What’s more confusing to a child - a same sex couple or not being able to talk about his or her family in class simply because the family is a same-sex household?

And finally,

Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that lgbts have families and that children in these households are thriving?

Why is it so hard for you to acknowledge that the concept of family belongs to us too?

Don’t our families deserve the same societal and legal protection and support that heterosexual families do?