Written by Marianne Møllman for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

The definition of family shown on television is far more progressive than the one understood by US law.

I don’t watch Modern Family, the prime-time sitcom depicting “non-traditional” — e.g., same-sex, interracial, and inter-generational — couples. Still, I’m struck by how fast family realities change and how slowly laws and societal perceptions about what’s “right” reflect those changes.

The couples depicted in Modern Family were surely seen by society at large as more unusual in 2009, when the show first aired, than even just five years later. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court is considering two cases that might pave the way for federal benefits for same-sex couples, the number of interracial marriages is steadily growing, and the combination of reproductive technologies, longer life-spans, and the normalization of serial monogamy has taken age somewhat out of the equation when it comes to forming a family.

Even so, real-life individuals in same-sex couples, or those who live with someone of a different race or generation from themselves, often face daily struggles to protect their families from legal uncertainty and publicly articulated disgust. Depending on where we live, our intimate lives and families may be subject to criminal sanctions, unequal legal protections, scrutiny, shaming, and belittling.

Often, the protection of our families in law — while welcome — does not mean we are immune to community shaming and violence. In Latin America, for example, a wave of new marriage equality laws has not yet had an impact on pervasive community violence against LGBTI individuals. And though it is more than 45 years since the Supreme Court invalidated the prohibition of interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia, prejudices against interracial couples — in particular where one of the partners is Black — are expressed frequently in social media and in some cases result in discrimination.

This tug-of-war between perceptions, laws, and reality expresses itself clearly where courts have to decide to what extent legislators get to put their own — or their constituents’ — prejudices before principles of equality and facts about child welfare.

This week, the European Court on Human Rights issued a ruling in one such case. The court held that Austria had violated human rights by denying two lesbian women a proper evaluation of their adoption petition. One of the women had petitioned to adopt the biological son of her female partner, a child they both had been parenting since infancy.

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Written by Susanna J. Smith for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.<

North Carolina polls are open for early voting in the primary election, and the rights of unmarried couples are being put to a public referendum.

I voted against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which seeks to amend the state constitution “to provide that marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in th[e] state.”

A recent Pew poll shows that nationally support for gay marriage is higher than ever —47 percent of Americans in favor of it; 43 percent opposing — but North Carolinians have tended to be less progressive on the issue. When Amendment One was introduced last September, public opinion polls reported that only 31 percent of North Carolinians were in favor of legalizing gay marriage, and 61 percent favored keeping it illegal.

The fate of the amendment to ban civil unions and gay marriage will be decided on May 8th, the official primary election day. Already at least one lawmaker, who played a critical role in getting the amendment on the ballot, has changed his mind about supporting it.

State Representative James Crawford was one of ten Democrats who supported putting the measure on the ballot. He has since said publicly he will vote against the amendment, it goes too far, amid impassioned outcries from constituents in the gay community.

Public opinion on the amendment is also changing, and advocates seeking to prevent the amendment’s passage are gaining ground. A new poll released last week shows:

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Written by Kathleen Reeves for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Last week, Tennessee’s State Senate passed out of committee SB49, the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Stacey Campfield, proposed this bill without luck for six years when he was a member of the House. Presumably too idiotic for state legislators in the past, the bill is now on the floor!

While the bill would technically outlaw discussion of homosexuality in the classroom before the ninth grade, its practical effects are unclear, for many reasons. First, Tennesee’s current guidelines on sexuality education, referred to (tellingly) as the “family life curriculum,” are vague and poorly-enforced. Family life education is overseen by Local Education Agencies, which often receive insufficient guidance from the state. As a result, sexuality education in Tennessee (such as it exists) is shrouded in darkness: it’s unclear what children and teenagers are learning, what and who their sources of knowledge are, and how effective this “curriculum” is.

One clear element of the state’s policy on sex ed is the mandatory promotion of abstinence. Every course on sexual health must “include presentations encouraging abstinence from sexual intercourse during the teen and pre-teen years,” according to the SIECUS report cited above. So Stacey Campfield’s insistence on banning gay talk seems redundant. … Read more

Written by Jodi Jacobson for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

In a late September column for RH Reality Check, Amanda Marcotte asked: Is the Media’s Tea Party Delusion Coming to An End? 

The answer quite obviously is no. Over the past several months, as Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Rand Paul, Joe Miller, Pat Toomey and other mad-hatters have stumped for office, I have listened and read in disbelief as one after another otherwise respected media representative or outlet continues to suggest that the Tea Party is not interested in "social conservative issues."

The media, and at this point I don’t know whether to describe it as mainstream, midstream or up a creek without a paddle, still persists in mis-reading and misrepresenting the broader context of what is happening in the 2010 elections. Reporting is done on the extemist positions of individual candidates, but virtually every analysis describing the Tea Party "movement," such as it is, continues to ignore or outright deny the extremist positions take by those candidates as representative of said movement.

Two weeks ago, for example, David Greene, a host on NPR’s All Things Considered interviewed New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, whose new book about the Tea Party, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America had just been published. 

Greene asks Zernike:

How cohesive is this movement looking down the road? I mean, you sat down with a lot of these groups who feel a connection to the Tea Party all over the country. You found a whole range of agendas, ideology, positions on social issues. How do they stick together?

Zernike responds:

Yeah, you know, it’s a very interesting question. One thing that people often get wrong about the Tea Party is they assume that this is just the old Christian conservatives under a different name. And that these are people who don’t want gay marriage and don’t believe in abortion rights, and they’re not. I mean, a lot of these people are socially conservative themselves, but they don’t want to talk about social issues. They think the Republican Party went wrong in spending so much time in talking about this – if you remember the debate about Terri Schiavo, the woman in Florida, and whether we should keep her alive.

Then, again last night, Congress.org published an article by Ambreen Ali entitled "Tea Party May Tackle Abortion Issues."

This articles states, presumably with a straight face:

So far, though many of the movement’s rank and file and a number of its top leaders are women, the tea partyers have stuck to the fiscal issues that brought them together.

They don’t want to talk about "social" issues?  May tackle abortion? Top leaders have stuck to fiscal issues?

Have Zernike and the reporters at Congress.org "drunk the tea" so to speak?

Are we talking about such "leaders" as Sharron Angle, Tea Party Queen of Nevada?  The one who stated that "rape" is part of "God’s Plan," and who consistently stated throughout the summer that she would vote to outlaw a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy even in cases of rape and incest?  Angle who would helpfully counsel a 13-year-old raped and pregnant by her own father that "two wrongs don’t make a right?" The Sharron Angle who not only opposes gay rights?  The Sharron Angle who answered this questionnaire? 

Are we talking about Delaware Senate Tea Party Candidate Christine O’Donnell?  The O’Donnell who believes in a "fundamentalist version of sexual "purity that emphasizes thoughts and feelings as well as deeds," who is against masturbation, advocates an absolute ban on abortion, and gave an interview to CBS on the subjects of "Virgins, Abortion, and God?"  Perhaps these reporters didn’t read Michelle Goldberg’s interview with O’Donnell’s former aide, who she dropped like a hot potato when he came out as being gay.

Are we talking about Tea Partier Joe Miller, running for Senate in Alaska, whose platform states: "I am unequivocally pro-life and life must be protected from the moment of conception to the time of natural death."  That Joe Miller?  Or the same Rand Paul who not only wants to go back to the days when businesses can discriminate against customers, and who also believes he knows "when life begins?"

Nikki Haley, Pat Toomey…every single one of these candidates has been talking about so-called "social issues," and more to the point they have articulated the most extreme of the extreme positions that exist in the minds of the fundamentalist right wing of this country and have been kept under wraps by campaign managers…until now.

Moreover, they are getting support from a wide range of sources from within the Republican party and from corporate sources.  This is no "bake-sale" fueled grassroots movement, yet the media continues to treat it as such. In Virginia, for example, Ginni Thomas, founder of Liberty Central and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, gave a talk to a group of women in Virginia organized by the conservative group Smart Girl Politics.  She said:

"I see more than fiscal issues being answered by the tea parties," Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, told a crowd of conservative women gathered to discuss—among other topics—overturning Roe v. Wade.

Yes, there are folks at the local level affiliated with Tea Party politics (whatever they are beyond disaffection) who do not see so-called social issues as their main concern. Ali of Congress.org, wrote:

About 55 percent of tea partyers are women, according to a Quinnipiac poll conducted in spring. So are six of the original eight board members of Tea Party Patriots, the largest national coalition group.

Jenny Beth Martin, an oft-quoted Patriots leader, has strived to keep the focus on three guiding principles: constitutionally limited government, fiscal responsibility, and free markets.

Yet at the local level, many tea parties are passionately anti-abortion.

Much of the media has failed and continues to fail to do its job on these Tea Party in any real sense. How many of reporters have read and incorporated any of the info in Jane Mayer’s excellent investigative article in the New Yorker on funding, training and sponsorship of the Tea Party by the billionaire Koch brothers whose fortunes are based largely on oil, and who have taken what was an inchoate group of disaffected people and created a "movement" that serves their own corporate interests?  Which one of these media outlets, even such respected and beloved outlets as NPR and the NYT, taken this further and examined how much money self-proclaimed Tea Party candidates are getting from such sources?

And which has focused on the fact that while so-called grassroots say one thing, the candidates are obviously ultra-right wing conservatives getting support from ultra-right wing conservatives from within and outside the formal structures of the Republican Party.  Note how quickly Lisa Murkowski was dumped by the Republican leadership in part because of her position on choice.

It is not hyperbole to say that we have a religious war underway today, and it is in fact a new Christian crusade, a crusade based on ideas about society no less fundamentalist in nature than is the Taliban and the most radical elements of politicized Islamists.  It is in part illustrative of the most radical fundamentalist Christian forces in the United States, who now feel free to suggest that even a 13-year old incest victim should endure and possibly die from a pregnancy than undergo an abortion and get covered in unquestioned in the "mainstream" media.  This war is enabled by the media writ large every time one of them goes on air or is quoted as if their ideas were not dangerous and without any context of where their support is coming from.

They’re talking about "social issues," and lots of other things about which we should be deeply and profoundly concerned.  The media just isn’t listening and certainly isn’t looking.

"Grassroots" folks who affiliate with the Tea Party may not articulate social issues as their priority, at first.  But to paraphrase Matthew: By their leaders ye shall recognize them.

Written by Anat Shenker-Osorio for RHRealityCheck.org – News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.

Healthy disregard for my lack of skill with a queue kept me out of San Juancito’s pool hall during my first year in the Peace Corps in Honduras. That and the insistence by the villagers that women weren’t allowed. But then another American, one with thoroughly feminist notions about why she absolutely would enter that pool hall, came to town.

Our attempt to play billiards prompted not just displeasure but hostility from the owner. His shaking hands — part fury part local made jet-fuel — gestured to a sign above the door: “Se Prohibe la Entrada a Menores de Edad” (Entry to Minors Prohibited.) Worldly 22- and 26-year olds, respectively, we pointed out that this sign didn’t bar us. But he insisted, for women the sign would always apply.

I can’t say I was exactly eager to become a regular — habit, testosterone and crappy plumbing meant the players pee into a trough at the back of the room. But the implication that as a woman I hadn’t reached — nor indeed could ever claim — adulthood pissed me off. Perhaps you’re thinking…well, that was Honduras — a less developed country without benefit of our enlightened feminist ideals.

But think now about whose right to decide is constantly questioned and tested and proscribed. I’ll give you a hint — it’s not about heterosexual men.

Among the hallmarks of adulthood is the right to make decisions — even colossaly stupid, spectacularly unsuccessful ones. Those around you may beg you not to marry that tax evader or to put on some sunscreen or to stop living on celery — but for better or worse if you’re an adult they can’t actually make you do or desist from what you deem right. It is not, as some opponents of abortion rights claim, the relative merits of a particular decision that grant the freedom to make it. The idea that because some people are troubled after termination is grounds for outlawing abortion makes just as much sense as prohibiting marriage. Our divorce rate attests to how often it’s a much-regretted and very bad choice.

One marker of adulthood is the right to make your own bed and the expectation that you’ll lay in it. This separates the capable from the immature. We’ve staked these rites of passage to particular ages, 16, 18, 21 or 25 — depending on what abilities are at stake. This obvious confusion about what counts as mature notwithstanding — the more troubling reality is that certain groups in our society just never get to be considered adult.

When Justice Roberts argues that women can’t possibly know what they want when they contemplate ending a pregnancy, we’re hearing a sober version of the logic that kept me from out of the pool hall. If women cannot be trusted to know what they want and act on that knowledge, then in effect we are saying they aren’t adults. Women aren’t the only ones whose right to make their own decisions is subject to outside approval. Gays and lesbians in almost all states are prohibited from selecting who to wed.

In a society where marriages are not arranged, selecting a spouse is the prototypical decision of adulthood. It’s no accident that our society fixates so much about weddings — this is a shared social ritual that marks us as grown up. Girls are taught to fantasize and hasten the arrival of this event; it’s a time they are granted some public recognition as adults. Boys, on the other hand, will grow into men whose ability and right to be considered mature is never in question. They don’t need any extra status and thus have no reason to long for their day as a groom.

Dr. Ilan Meyer, during the trial to restore marriage equality in California, spoke about the role marriage plays in our common notions of the desirable rites of adulthood: “We all grow up and are raised to think that there are certain things we want to achieve in life…It is I think quite clear that the young children do not aspire to be domestic partners. But certainly the word marriage is something people aspire to…a common socially approved goal for children as they think about their future and for people as they develop relationship. It’s a desirable and respectable goal.”

So what does it mean when a group is systematically denied the right to pick who they want to marry? Or another group whose desire to decide what happens to their bodies is questioned and constantly curtailed? At some level, even if only unconsciously, it means we think they aren’t adults. The great irony of this is that it’s only in making decisions and living with the consequences that we can both become and demonstrate we are more mature. What we deny outright to gays and lesbians and attempt to diminish for women is not just the mantle of adult but the opportunities to become worthy of this designation.

Social conservatives cannot complain that their issues have not been heard in the 2008 campaign, in exactly the fashion they wanted.

John McCain selected the far-right’s hand-picked candidate as his running mate, Sarah Palin, instead of either of his preferred choices, Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge. McCain used one of the far-right’s most egregious and most thoroughly debunked attacks, that Barack Obama supports infanticide, in the final presidential debate. The Republican Party platform is recognized as the most extreme platform in history on cultural issues. Palin has talked up "Culture of Life" issues in her very few interviews, and John McCain has as well, going on record saying he believes life begins at conception. The Republican National Committee, several pro-life lobbying groups, at least two independent expenditure campaigns and the McCain campaign have used television, radio, mail, internet and robo-calls to deliver what appears to be a coordinated message on the "Born Alive" infanticide charge.

The McCain-Palin campaign attacked comprehensive sexuality education, supported bans on gay marriage, and several fundamentalist Christian churches openly defied tax and election law by endorsing the ticket from their pulpits to further energize their base. Everyone is talking about the importance of the Supreme Court and attacks Read the rest of this entry →