Photo credit: Mary Ellen Mark for the New Yorker
Fascinating New Yorker article here, one I’ve been meaning to blog about since returning from holiday. About how Hollywood high-flyer and Oscar winner Haggis abandoned the organisation he now calls a cult, over their refusal to disown Proposition 8 and treat his gay daughters as equals.
Main image by Jennifer Huddleston
It’s like it is back to the 1980s in this piece …
Three cheers to Jennifer Huddleston the local shopper who was clever enough to take the photo above and get word out about the stupid ‘family friendly’ choices of this American store manager.
Basically, the mag – US Weekly – shows dads Elton John and David Furnish cuddling their surrogate baby Zachary, who was born on Christmas Day. But in grocery chain Harps, a plastic pornography cover called ‘Family Shield’ was used to cover up the gay couple.
No matter how normal gay people try to be, it’s just not good enough for some!
This is a lovely trailer / excerpt about an American family across four generations … from the loving great-aunts of one of the first lesbian couples to marry in Massachusetts to the little boys now living in the home the families has struggled to hold onto since the 1850s … their ups and downs definitely makes you want to watch more of “The Gay Marriage Thing” http://www.thegaymarriagething.com/
Learn more about this work from Stephanie Higgins here: http://www.thegaymarriagething.com/directors_statement.htm
Posting yesterday about the French lesbians using lack of privacy as an equality lever made me wonder how much more French material I’ve been overlooking.
Here is an interesting recent debate on France24 (in English): everyone claims to want to further human rights (it’s France, of course they would) but the Christian Democrat guy clearly squirms when asked to reconcile how one can be for human rights but not equality… suddenly inequality is all about protecting children’s rights.
Heather, Esther Kraft and Kathryn Kraft / photo Heather Kraft
Two stories today made me firm up my view of what the magic number of support is. If we can get 2 out 3 people to solidly support marriage equality I think that two-thirds support is when social change has been achieved. Most politicians would be thrilled with 55% support, but then they don’t tend to last more than a few years. We want equality to last forever, and we want it to be very hard to undo.
2/3, 67% tends to be the special majority parliaments and organisations need to change their constitution. It also means one has at least twice as many supporters as opponents.
Which stories made me think of this? News that 67% of Irish people support marriage equality (a huge turnaround for a long heavily Catholic country) and the news that 68% of Americans think that gays and lesbians can form families or that a same sex couple is a family (sadly 30% includes pets but not gays in their definition of family)
We often hear about the fact that more lesbians and gays are raising children – from their same sex relationships or from earlier ones.
But as one participant in a new Irish study says: “Everyone talks about us, but no-one ASKS US!” what it is like to be in such a family. The people making laws about them in particular fail to ask these questions.
So that is exactly what Marriage Equality Ireland did: interviewed children from 12 families headed by same sex couples.
The report also details incidents of everyday homophobia, in particular the policy of some schools who will not allow sick children go home with their non-biological parent, and how children act in their daily life:
“They’ve always been my moms … me calling (name) my mother’s partner is sort of a really
bizarre thing in my head. It’s just my mum and my mum. And it’s differentiating between them is like: mum 1 and mum 2, mum A and mum B, or nonbiological and biological mother; but it’s just mum and mum …”
Ireland recently passed a law allowing for civil partnerships but not full marriage equality.
A lovely anecdote here from a subruban mother about how she took up the issue of marriage equality with her neighbours.
Australia’s major political parties might be struggling to understand what equality means … but watch this. This is a fairly typical Australian man, who has changed his views on gay people and marriage because of a family experience.
Change is coming when people like him start speaking out on national television.
Republican San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders apologized to the city’s gay and lesbian residents yesterday for not having always supported same-sex marriage.
Sanders was speaking at The San Diego LGBT Community Center at a celebration of U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s striking down of Proposition 8 earlier in the day. His conversion therapy was so successful Sanders was actually a key witness in the recent Proposition 8 trial in San Francisco.
Here’s one for US TV fans … Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet reckons “there is no doubt” that the Emmy-nominated comedy show will marry up the gay dad stars Cameron and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson).
