• Posted By landismom @ 1/04/2006 09:36:00 AM • • •
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
whose family are you friendly to?
Trey at Daddy, Papa & me has a great post up today about the movement of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered families out of states where their civil rights are being taken away. There's a pretty chilling series of maps, too, showing how many states have adopted anti-family-friendly legislation in just the last five years.
I'm sure that the people who led those legislative charges wrapped themselves in the fabric of motherhood and apple pie, wrapped themselves in the 'family-friendly' label. But I'm one mom who's here to tell you that what they're doing is anything but family friendly. It's divisive, and hurtful, and we can't stand for it. It would be unconscionable to allow Trey's family to be split up purely because it is a family headed by two men, just as it would be unconscionable to allow the government to split a family that is interracial, or practices two religions.
In related news, The Library Lady posted today about how parenthood is not the key to happiness. Anyone who has been a parent for longer than a minute knows that it is, as she says, the hardest job in the world. We all--regardless of our race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, economic class--struggle with how hard it can be. We all want our children to grow up feeling loved, but also developing personal responsibility. We want them to succeed. And it is a hard thing to nurture a child. There are days when we all want to just have the children magically disappear for an afternoon, or to have a Mary Poppins-like nanny appear and take them to the tearoom for a few hours.
Why on earth would anyone who is a parent want to take away parental rights from another parent, unless it's for neglect or abuse? How can you, knowing what you know about the stresses of parenting, add to the stress felt by another parent by making a person like Trey--a good dad, who loves his daughter--feel like the state is threatening to take his daughter away?
It's time for us to reclaim the definition of family-friendly to include all families.
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