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Watercooler: High school prom finally gets
the gay thing right
The gay community and proms have had a rather
rough relationship this year , but a high school in New York bucked
the trend by electing two openly gay boys their prom king and queen.
Charlie
Ferrusi and Timmy Howard are best friends and seniors at Hudson High
School where their peers voted them king and queen by an overwhelming
majority.
“It’s a really big step for Hudson but also for the gay
community in general,” Howard said in an interview with The Register Star . “To have this happen in our
city is pretty exciting.”
In
2008, a male student, Augie Abatecola, ran for prom queen at Hudson
High and won the election, but school officials refused him his crown.
Ferrusi and Howard checked with the administration before the prom this
time, and received official approval to run.
The school principal,
Steven Spicer said, “We’re proud of all our students. They know they
have the right to pick whoever they want. It was exciting for them and
it was exciting for Charlie and Tim.”
Ferrusi and Howard say they
plan on participating in Hudson, NY’s first ever gay pride parade which
will be on Sun, June 20. They will don their crowns and homemade sashes.
Florida
Governor Charlie Crist , now running as an independent, recently
dropped language about his opposition to abortion from his campaign
website.
His current campaign website also does not have anti-gay
rights language.
In the past, Crist’s site had applauded his
anti-abortion work.
“Charlie was victorious in defending parental
notification rights before the Florida Supreme Court,” the site read.
While
there is no language on his website now about same-sex marriage, Crist
in the past has said that civil unions for same-sex couples are “fine, but I
support marriage between a man and a woman.”
Even before Crist’s
official change in political party, he changed his public views on gay
adoption. During his 2006 gubernatorial election, he said that he had
not yet made a decision about his opinion on Florida’s ban on gay
adoption, but that he thought that “traditional family is the best to
adopt.”
Crist lost much Republican support over the years because
of his more moderate positions. He worked with the Obama Administration
on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which many Republican
governors united against, he opposes some forms of offshore drilling in
the Gulf of Mexico and he supports stem cell research.
When asked
in 2009 during a state-wide tour to celebrate “Explore Adoption Day,”
about his views on the Florida ban, Crist told the Florida Times-Union , “I think Florida has it right
now.”
Rashida Jones (Parks and Recreation) and Zooey Deschanel
(500 Days of Summer) will be playing a same-sex couple in the
upcoming film, My Idiot
Brother .
The film is the story of four siblings played by
Paul Rudd, (I Love You Man), Elizabeth Banks (30 Rock), Emily Mortimer
(Shutter Island), and Deschanel, dealing with their mother and creating
chaos and comedy along the way.
Deschanel plays a bisexual who has trouble
committing to her girlfriend, played by Jones. My Idiot Brother is
scheduled to be released in 2011
Corvino: The gay parenting difference –
and why it doesn’t matter to marriage
, columnist, 365gay.com
06.11.2010 7:00am EDT
06.11.2010 7:00am EDT
Opponents
of marriage equality often refer to the “untested experiment” of
same-sex parenting, asserting that we just don’t know how children in
these families will fare over the long haul. They point to the fact that
there has never been a significant long-term longitudinal study of such
children’s welfare—that is, one that follows the same group of children
over time.
They
can no longer make the latter claim.
In the current issue of the
journal Pediatrics, Drs. Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos report on their
25-year study of the psychological adjustment of donor-conceived
children in 78 lesbian-parented families . They followed the
families from before the children’s birth until they were 17 years old,
interviewing the lesbian birth mothers at various points during this
span, as well as interviewing the children at ages 10 and 17.
They
then compared this data with a general normative sample of American
youth (known as Achenbach samples), controlling for similar
socioeconomic status. The study, which is ongoing, constitutes the
largest, longest-running, prospective longitudinal study of same-sex
parented families to date, with results published in the peer-reviewed
official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
What they
found is that the 17-year-old children of the lesbian mothers scored
significantly higher than their peers in social and academic competence,
and significantly lower in social problems, rule-breaking, and
aggressive behavior.
That’s right: the lesbians’ kids
outperformed their peers. This does not surprise me.
One reason
it doesn’t surprise me is because I’ve known lesbian parents, and they
rock.
But it also doesn’t surprise me because of an important
general fact about same-sex parents. Unlike heterosexual parents,
same-sex parents typically don’t wake up and say “Oops, we’re pregnant.”
For them, becoming parents is never a matter of simply going through
the motions. It’s something into which they must put a great deal of
planning and commitment—factors which translate into positive outcomes,
for traditional and non-traditional families alike.
If I’m right
about this, then the moral of the story is not that lesbian parents are
better than straight parents. (Sorry, lesbians.) It’s that thoughtful,
committed parents are better, and that a lot of lesbian parents fit that
description.
Many marriage-equality opponents claim to know
this already.
“Sure, there are good lesbian parents out there,”
they say. “But on average, two-biological-parent families do better than
any other family form.”
They will doubtless argue that the
current study doesn’t show otherwise, because it doesn’t control for
biological relatedness in the Achenbach comparison group.
Let’s
suppose they’re right about all that. What follows?
What follows
is that gays and lesbians shouldn’t kidnap children from their own
biological mothers and fathers. Since that’s not happening, the
opponents’ point is a red herring.
I don’t mean to be glib, but
from the premise “on average, two-biological-parent families do better
than any other family form,” to the conclusion “Therefore, we should not
allow same-sex couples to marry,” there are a lot of missing steps.
Indeed, more like entire missing staircases. Marriage-equality opponents
never acknowledge those missing staircases, much less address them.
We
allow many couples to marry who fall short of the purported parenting
ideal—as we should. Notably, we allow stepfamilies to form, even though
the very same premise that opponents cite against same-sex-parented
families applies to them: “on average, two-biological-parent families do
better than any other family form.”
We allow poor people to
marry, people without college degrees to marry, people in rural areas to
marry, and so on, even though there is substantial research—far more
decisive than that surrounding same-sex parenting—showing that, on
average, children fare less well in these environments than in the
contrasting ones.
My point is that the debate over marriage
equality is not the same as the debate over parenting ideals—as much as
our opponents try to make it so. We need to call them out on this
diversion.
Meanwhile, we should welcome this new study as
providing insight into lesbian families. Like any study, it has its
limitations. It studies only lesbians, not gay men. The data are based
on mothers’ reports (although so are the Achenbach comparison data). The
lesbian parents studied were not randomly selected—a procedure that
would have been preferable, but also unrealistic in the 1980’s when
same-sex families were more often hidden. (On the other hand, it is a
prospective study, so volunteers wouldn’t have known ahead of time that
their children would fare well.)
These limitations, and the
study’s broader implications, will inevitably be subject to critical
debate. That is as it should be.
But let’s not confuse that
debate with the debate over our right to marry.