Essay Post...Why Be Moral?

Hello dear readers...

Following up on the topic of the last post about identity, this week we were asked to discuss why we live life the way we do....in essence, why be moral? Is morality something that is subjective to each person, or is there an objective morality that holds true for all? We were asked to talk about our own sense of morals and specifically, why we think they are important(or not important).

For inspiration, we were asked to read several works. One of which was Plato's "The Ring of Gyges", in which an everyday man finds a ring that can turn him invisible. The purpose of the work was to show that even good people can be tempted to do bad things when they think no one is watching. It further went on to give a lengthy philosophical discourse on how to know the difference between a just man and an unjust one by their reactions to being accused of injustice.

To me, all of this seemed like mental gymnastics for their own sake. Will people do shady things if they think no one is watching?....probably. But to focus on that fact and stop there seems to miss a big point. All of us make awful mistakes at some point in life, you simply can not be a human being and escape that fact.  Life is full of making mistakes, yet it's what we learn from them that matters. Also, it seemed to me that there was a danger in focusing on the philosophical and ignoring the fact that morals are simply choices we make in the small moments of every day.

This post was a much harder one for me to write than the last because who sits around thinking about why they hold the morals they do? We all have them in one form or other, but how often do we need to reflect on them really?

But before I start rewriting the essay here, perhaps I should just let you read it for yourself...

Essay Post...Who Am I?

Hello dear readers...no, the title does not mean we are playing a guessing game so you can stop panicking now.

I have not been around very much and I have to apologize for that. As many of you may already know, I have returned to college to polish my writing skills and to finish the degree I abandoned cold turkey in my twenties. Funny thing...turns out college is a lot of hard work! Who knew right? All kidding aside, even though I have not been writing here, I have been doing a ton of writing for class...some of which my husband thinks is suitable for mass consumption here. So, to make sure I stay out of the dog house with both you and my husband...here you go...

My professor has been giving us writing assignments meant to draw out our worldview. He is beginning with topics personal to us and is working outward to topics in which we may have less of a personal stake in, but in which we will have to form an opinion and craft an argument. This first essay was us, describing who we were in 800-1200 words(Doesn't this guy know I can't say anything in less than 10,000?!!). How do you boil down who you believe you are into such a small space?...Read on to find out...

Guest Post...Cats By Selena

Today we have the honor of hosting a post by a major up and coming blogger...my 9 year old daughter Selena...who unceremoniously announced this morning(while I was cleaning the bathroom) that she was writing a blog. I asked her if it was ok if I share it with all of you and she said yes...as long as I give equal credit to Domino, her cat as co-author. Done and Done...so without further ado..

Cats

By Selena Leffew and Domino the Cat

The word "cat" means than a pet. It means friend, because cats are fun. They sleep with you and they are not loud. Most cats don't do that, but mine does. If you want your cat to like you, act like a cat...be a friend.

Short but sweet and sage advice...Until next time dear readers...

Adoption, Compassion, and The Pitfalls of "Sincerely Held Religious Beliefs"

As many of the readers to this blog are also subscribers to our YouTube channel...you may already know that we are a same-sex family that built our family via adoption...and that adoption was done through a third party agency working with the state to match couples like my husband and me, with children that need a forever family. It is the best thing we have ever done in our lives and it is because of this that this weeks blog post hits all my angry buttons. Some people just seem to want to ensure that kids remain unadopted forever.

What do I mean?...

recent legislation written and introduced by Senator Mike Enzi(R) of Wyoming and Congressman Mike Kelly(R) of Pennsylvania have introduced a bill titled "The Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act of 2014". This rather tongue-in-cheek title should rather be called the "child welfare exclusion act" because what it does is ensure that third party agencies that provide child welfare services can no longer be forced to provide those services in the instance that doing so would cause them to violate their "sincerely held religious beliefs". You know, like believing gay people are an abomination?...yeah, those kind.

To get an idea of what is happening here, take the recent Hobby Lobby Supreme Court Ruling, Throw in all the compassion that the GOP has shown to children in the recent border crisis, put it in a cocktail shaker with a dose of complete ignorance...shake it up and Viola!...you have a chilled concoction of such toxic stupidity I wouldn't even give it to my dog.

In another example of religious zeal leading to shooting themselves square in the face, they have done it again...only this time, they are trying to drag families like mine down with them. And it's time to set the record straight.

Balance of Power

    No this will not be a post about politics  or any  current world events that would make any sane thinking person to the conclusion that the world has lost it's collective mind. No...the loss of sanity I would like to talk about today is much closer to home. Finding the balance of power within your relationship....be that married, dating, domestically partnered, or any combination there of.....dividing up responsibilities such as who stays home, who pays the bills, who cleans what, who gets the kids to school can be more than a little crazy making....and a constant source of relationship negotiation.

Being both Gay and a stay at home dad, I think a lot of people may get a skewed idea that gay couples struggle both more and less than others do in this area. There are those who are still so hidebound in their notion of gender roles that anyone who stays home gets labeled as "the mom", with the working parent as "the dad"...and then, on the other end of the spectrum are the people who's only exposure to gay couples is on TV. To them we are all independently wealthy enough to afford nannies, have immaculate homes, and dress our whole family like an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, all the while maintaining our perfect gym bodies. Yeah, right....as if...my tummy begs to differ.

Nope, we struggle the same as the next couple does with all the same issues as any other couple and being two men or two women does not alter the dynamics of coupledom much. Which is probably why one of the fights I am most likely to have with my husband is about "who" did "what" all day(or did not get done)....and what we think we are entitled to as a result. This can spark the flames of argument like nothing else.

 Sound like a recipe for disaster? Is it a sign of relationship problems?....pour yourself a cup'o joe and lets discuss...

Toward A More Perfect Union

LGBTQI....

It is a term many of us struggle to pronounce let alone wrap our minds around what it means. Indeed, when I came out in the 90's the term was already in flux from various forms of GLB to LGB. Not long after, I learned we had added the "T" and a whole bunch of people freaked out about that. However, in spite of all their histrionics about the addition of Transgendered to the label our community wears...it stuck, and has been the (mostly) accepted lingo we have used for most of my adult gay life. Most recently, we have added Intersex and Queer/Questioning to include a spectrum of experience that transcends both sexual orientation and sexual identity. It may be hard to say, but until we invent a single word to describe the experience...it is the best we have.

While it may be an awkward term to explain to those outside our community. We have to explain what each letter means and why it is used. More often than not, their expression reads as if I had tried to explain life on another planet. However, they are not the only ones...Some who fall under it's broadly inclusive banner also struggle to understand what links us all together. For example...

In a totally bewildering exchange that took place on Americablog. John Aravosis, a writer I have respected over the years has written an article titled The End Of Gay History . A piece initially meant to speculate on the future of gay activism and orgs in the face of the victories they have achieved. The actual question asked being, "Are we at the end of gay history?" However, what actually developed by the end of the story was less about the relevancy of gay activism in the gay community...and more a wild veering off into the perceived fractures between the letters of our movement. And I used the word "perceived" for a reason. The whole thing was one massive /facepalm moment.

That this post devolved into a fight  between "gay white men" and the Transgendered community, left me bewildered and scratching my head at just what the hell any of these people were thinking. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

Among the issues that surfaced  were...Who are we as a community? What binds us together? And as we see progress on one front, how do we treat the others who aren't advancing as fast?...at least, that's the nice way of phrasing what they posed much less nicely. Pull up a chair and your favorite cup'o something and lets tackle this messy business head on...

The Great Truvada Debate

When we talk about gay rights...and how far we have come as a community, I think many people would think first of the tide of marriage equality that has been steadily advancing across the nation. This is what makes the news and has become a defining movement for the community. And indeed, we have come very far in the legal recognition of our lives and loves, thus beginning to stem a tide of injustice that was just an accepted and given part of gay life as I knew it when I came out. It is amazing to be writing this to you as an out, gay, and married man with a family as those things were so far beyond my dreams not too long ago.

But there are other issues and conversations that move us along as a community with equal momentum. Some of those conversations are quite heated and so emotionally laden that they are hard to approach. Today's blog is one of those for me. Living the life that I have, and coming to terms with my sexuality when I did....I understand the debate over Truvada affects me, as it does all of us....but another part of me feels so ill prepared to tackle it with the breadth and understanding I think this topic deserves. However, there are few topics today that can cause such heated division as Truvada...and PreP therapies in general. For something sold as an "advancement in HIV prevention, it has engendered such a divided response, with both sides digging in their heels in their positions...that it leaves anyone looking in from the outside confused as to why this drug that can save lives should get this much controversy.

Is there actually a meta-conversation going on underneath the outward discussion of facts and transmission rates? Are we still grappling with old fears and ingrained self prejudices that is keeping us from see this drug as anything other than another tool in the fight against HIV? As the debate swings from one heated comment to another...what are we saying to ourselves, about ourselves?

Milestones...Daniel Graduates Junior High

For some, graduating Junior High may not seem like a big deal. Heck, even the school itself doesn't call the act "Graduation" anymore. They call it "promotion"....a weird term at best, and begs the question of what they are promoting to, and does it come with a raise? But there I sat, in the rows of identical, red folding chairs, set up on the lawn in the warm spring sun, looking at a ring of chairs set up for the graduates and realized.....this is happening. Next year my son will be in high school. The little boy that I once knew, was being replaced by a young man. Another world was passing away and all of us, as a family are standing on the doorstep of a new one. It feels like just yesterday that Daniel was a third grader and a new student to our little charter school. As proud as I am to be here to celebrate this moment with Daniel, the time just seemed to have gone by too fast and I could not help but  look back to remember all that had brought us here...

Gay Rights..Where Are We Now?

Hello everyone....

It has been sometime since I last spoke to all of you. For reasons I will detail further on, writing had become a chore that I didn't understand why I was still doing. But I am happy to be back and I hope that this will mark a new beginning....not only for this blog...but in my life. In fact, the title of todays post offers a clue of what I want to share with you all. So without further ado...

This evening I watched the HBO adaptation of "The Normal Heart", written by HIV and gay rights activist Larry Kramer. For those unfamiliar...the subject of the drama was a retelling of the early years in which AIDS began killing young men in the new York gay community and the struggle to get an uncaring government to respond and a terrified gay community to galvanize in it's own defense. With no medical information on what was happening and why we were getting sick, half the battle was in combating fear and marching on in the face of uncertainty and the loss of friends and lovers that went on unabated. The film shows the foundation of one of the first gay organizations to respond to the AIDS crisis, Gay Mens Health Crisis, and is told from the perspective of one of it's founders Larry Kramer(renamed Ned Weeks in the film), who is often criticized for being too loud, too confrontational, too critical in his roll as an activist fighting against the tide of death all around him.

I watched this movie in tears for the most part(while developing a crush on Mark Ruffalo).....and then I lied awake most of the night thinking about it. Something in me had shifted. You see, I had stopped blogging after DOMA had been struck down because I did not see any need for what I was doing anymore. Prop 8 had launched us into the fight for gay rights, not limited to marriage equality, but when that goal seemed realized...I didn't know what I was doing anymore.

Until someone asked me an innocent question....

VICTORY!...... DOMA and Prop 8 are Gone!

In a double ruling, the United States Supreme Court today struck down the Defense  of Marriage Act by a 5-4 margin....AND.... dealt the final blow to Prop 8. Both are now gone.

Our family has been fighting Prop 8 since the day it was announced in 2008. Nearly as soon as we could get married did the news come someone would fight it...as we knew they would. We all had to move so fast to get married before the window closed that My husband and I had to marry a week before when we would have, which would have been my birthday and the anniversary of our domestic partnership. That day would also have been the day Prop 8 passed at the ballot box. A day we will always remember as being a very sad one. And yet here we are nearly five years and many court battles later....still standing and still married. Prop 8 has been such a big part of our lives for the last five years that it's stamp can never be undone. It launched us into activism...onto YouTube and this blog...and brought so many amazing people and experiences into our lives that I am almost grateful for it even as I celebrate its passing.

And DOMA too. I almost don't even know what to say because a part of me always feared that the Supremes would find a way to wiggle out of striking it down. I really can't believe it's gone as well. This, more than anything is the reason for the picture I have put at the top of this blog. Just like the destruction of the Death Star, DOMA has always been a similar instrument of tyranny...and its demise no less dramatic and far reaching. I know that for my whole life, I have believed and accepted that no government would accept or sanction and gay relationship.....that was just the world I came out in. Hell...DOMA was signed into law at about the same time that I came out, further underscoring the collective statement that gay people would be forever unprotected by the laws that would always treat us like strangers to those we love and spend our lives with. We were on our own and that was just the way it was. How amazing to be writing this day celebrating the end, not only of DOMA and Prop 8, but that way of thinking.

Between the Deaths of Prop 8 and DOMA I feel like I am standing in a completely different world. In fact...I am. And just as the destruction of the Death Star in  Star Wars was seen as an impossible task...so to was this. There were cries of joy....and great exhales of relief. That's how I feel today.

I know that tommorow will  bring new battles and more insane comments by people who simply will not let gay people get on with our lives. We know we have more work to do.....But today is a day to celebrate.

Reclaiming Dignity For Discharged LGBT Soldiers

When we think of the legacy of witch hunts against LGBT people by the military we tend to think about Don't Ask Don't Tell. However, the sad legacy of dishonorable discharges over sexuality  that ruined the lives of many fine LGBT men and women goes back generations...The first dedicated efforts being undertaken by the armed forces during World War II with the military recruited soldiers to participate in undercover entrapment schemes in order to snare gay soldiers that they feared were a security risk because enemy agents could threaten them with exposure if they did not hand over military intelligence. This view of LGBT soldiers as an easily exploitable security risk coupled with bias and homophobic beliefs about gay people continued unabated in the minds of military brass and Politicians until the Don't Ask Don't Tell process ripped the lid off of it. But after so many decades and thousands of discharges, the damage done to LGBT service people is almost incalculable. How could you ever begin to make up for so many ruined lives?

Well someone has proposed the first step. Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York are proposing the "Restore Honor To Servicemans Act" which would amend the records of some 114,000 servicemen and women to reflect their honorable service.

This is great. However, considering how far back the damage goes...and so many lives not only altered by their discharge, but sometimes destroyed simply by being outed...I am left wondering what this will really accomplish? Lets take a deeper look...

The Tale of The Nightingale Empress

As many of you readers may already know. This year our family was invited to be Grand Marshals at the this years Pride celebration and awarded the José Julio Sarria History Maker award for our families work for marriage equality and LGBT families. We were honored and excited to receive this award but the very next thing we discovered was that we had no idea who José Julio Sarria was. In fact, I would bet that most people don't. That's the unfortunate thing about the often interrupted timeline of gay history, the lives and stories of important LGBT people are still left to be unearthed and brought into the light. Many now know of Harvey Milk because of the movie about his life, but there are many more characters to discover and tales to be told and just waiting to be rediscovered.  And since we were receiving and award for "history making" in Sarria's name, we figured there must be quite a story to be told. In fact there is....

Is This The Year Of The Dads?

Hello readers! Welcome back! Since Father's Day is fast approaching and it just happens to be Pride month here in Califronia, I thought it might be a good day to talk a little bit about a subject near and dear to my heart.....gay dads! This week my partner pointed out the picture above from this years NYC Pride Guide, and ignoring the rather snarky question about marriage spelling the end of gay culture, I had to admit that I was surprised to find the cover graced by what appeared to be a family even if the "dads" still looked like they fell of out of an underwear ad. While it is not abnormal to find absurdly hot guys on the cover of a Pride magazine, it is a little unusual for them to portray them as parents. And yes, this shot looks staged as hell. That baby looks like he's just as much an accessory as the sunglasses he's about to whip off and throw on the ground. But its still something to see these men as father's and a family instead of just two hot guys that may or may not be a couple. We are used to seeing sex in images like this....it is something else to see the message of a family.

Paired with all the T.V. shows that have portrayed gay dads this year, like the recently canceled "The New Normal", Cam and Mitchell from "Modern Family", and the briefly aired "Two Dads, Ten Kids" on the Oprah Network....it has led my partner to marvel at how we have come from near invisibility to being all over the place. Was this magazine pointing to an explosion of acceptance of gay dads.....or just a tacit nod that we now exist in numbers significant enough to warrant recognition?

To be honest, I hadn't really given it much thought. I had just welcomed each new change as it happened, But, since he brought it up I had to ask if he was right? Since when did we become so big?! Are we living in the year of the gay dads?

Family...

For many of us it's a thorny subject. For myself, having built my family by adoption, we know that family is something more than blood or the people that may have been born to. Family are the people who actually raise you and stand by you no matter  what. Yet, when it comes to political discourse over in this country, we talk a big game about family being the bedrock of our culture and society...and then forget to mention all the gay people that get left out of that definition of family.  There have whole organisations who claim to want to protect and preserve families even though the bulk of them don't give a dam about families and just want to stop gays from being full participants in society (FRC anyone?). We expend an enormous amounts of energy and words talking about families and what they mean to us as a culture.....but what we experience as individuals is often something totally different.

Recently my son had the honor to read the letter he wrote to Supreme Court Justice John Roberts at BAYS....an LGBT youth leadership summit held here in the bay area. Bays is a completely youth run non profit organisation that helps LGBT young people and allies learn how to be leaders involved in their own schools and local communities as leaders and safe schools advocates. It's quite a mouthful to say but what they have put together was something absolutely amazing and we were all honored that Daniel was chosen as one of their keynote speakers.

The event was MC'd by Rupauls Drag Race Winner Raja (who did an awesome job. At one point in the evening she made the observation that about how incredible it was to have such an event in which so many young people were not only "out" but were training others to be LGBT leaders and advocates in their own schools. In the days when Raja (and myself) were in high school you couldn't even wear an ear ring in the wrong ear or you suffered the consequences. But what she said next struck home....in those days she said, we identified each other by saying "oh...they are family" and as she scanned an audience of mostly teens she wondered out loud if that term was passing away.......Was it?

Now, anyone over the age of thirty still knows that term, but I had to wonder...in a generation that can be out and accepted by friends and family in a way that many of us of previous generations never could, is that definition of family being lost because we no longer have to lean on each other as we once did? And it took me back in time to when I first learned who my gay family was and why we needed each other.

Happy Star Wars Day...May 4th 2013!

Todays title says it all really. May the 4th is a day set aside to completely wallow in Star Wars geekery...hence the phrase, "May the 4th be with you." Not that I need a special day to wallow in geekery mind you, it's sort of a 24/7 thing with me and it will always revolve around Star Wars in some way. Yes....it's Star Wars day every day for me.

Given what our family does on YouTube I have been very lucky to find many kindred spirits but...there are also just as many that don't get it at all. You can always tell when someone visits my house, see's our Star Wars collection...and then politely smiles as they back out there door with a look on their face like they just stepped into the something more like Silence of the Lambs. yeah...not everybody gets it.

So I thought I would take this opportunity to talk about how I became a fan and what Star Wars has meant to me over the years. This isn't apologetics...I'm not attempting to make myself look any less fanatical. but hopefully, those of my readers who don't have any connection with a "galaxy far far away" might begin to understand why I feel the way I do...and perhaps why all superfans(Dr. who, Star Trek, Harry Potter etc.) are really just big kids at heart.

Adoption Stories...First Contact

A while back (wow, it was June of last year!) I a post titled "Cold Case" I talked about our Daughter, Selena, beginning to ask some rather pointed questions about her biological mother and how difficult it was going to be to find anything now that state adoptions felt the case was forever closed.  that launched us into becoming amateur detectives in order to track down our children's biological family. We have always been really open with the kids about where they came from and how they came to be with us, but now that they were actually wanting to know more about their family, it had caught us off guard and wondering how the heck we were going to find anything when all we had was a hand written family tree in Daniels adoption binder that only had the first names of his older siblings and their ages at the time of Daniels removal....not a lot to go on. Well, thanks to the help of a good friend and some major facebook and google sleuthing, we found a list of names of likely candidates. And so I had sent them all facebook messages, crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

And then nothing....

We has absolutely no response at all and quietly, inside my heart I was heartbroken for the kids. We wondered if we got the wrong people, or perhaps their older siblings had been so scarred by their experience with their family that they simply wanted nothing to do with them anymore...even if they were long lost siblings. People rarely react the way we think they are going to and everyone has their own reasons for saying no to a contact that most of us would jump at the chance to realize. But we let it go, resigned to try it again later, and got on with our lives. All of us forgot about it and got caught up in the daily grind of homework, karate, fencing, foster child visits, and Youtube. And then,out of the blue...something amazing happened...

Seeing Our Best In Our Darkest Moments

Hello dear readers...it is nice to be back after missing last week. Over that time however, it seems as if some crazy things have been happening in the world. The Boston bombings and fertilizer plant explosion in Texas has been on mind all week as it seems as if the wounds of the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings haven't even healed yet...but....it's not those tragedies themselves that are in my thoughts these day so much as our response to them. Terrible events tend to bring us together as a people in ways I wish we would find when we aren't grieving some terrible loss.

I spend my days swimming through a see of opinion about people attitudes and opinions to LGBT people and our rights and if you can say one thing about it, it is that it is contentious. The loudest voices are often the most hateful ones and those people need to be met and countered. The path to seeing an LGBT person as a normal human being and not a national threat has been a long and loud one and we are far from seeing the end of it. Even the repeal of Doma and the passage of  LGBT inclusive immigration and work place reforms will not end the culturally entrenched homophobia that still needs to be met daily with courage and truth.

But as I watch the T.V. in the wake of the Boston Bombings and hear such amazing stories of  compassion...like people running toward the blast sights to help the injured instead of running away in self protection...it makes me think. Why can not this be who we are all the time? And given that LGBT people are there in these same events, suffering in the carnage and helping to heal it...when will the world learn that we have bigger problems to face in the world than two people of the same-sex getting married?

Why Is It Still OK To Demean Gay People?

Todays blog can be thought of as an extension of last weeks in which I talk about how many in religion have made LGBT people into their chief enemy....abandoning all pretense at love or the message of Jesus to espouse a political viewpoint in "the culture wars". This week picks up the topic again with Pastor David James Manning of the YouTube channel ATLAHworldwide.

Earlier this month Pastor Manning produced a video called "Age Matters All The Time" in which Pastor Manning attempted to make the point that anyone below the age of thirty was not mature enough to vote. For an example of this Pastor Manning used my son Daniels video letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, using his image and his full name to accuse my husband Jay and myself of being child molesters and child rapists for allowing our son to not only understand the issue of same-sex marriage...but to allow him to voice his opinion about a topic that directly effects his family.

Now, that video was up for several days before ultimately being flagged and pulled from YouTube to be reviewed for inappropriate content. It was at this point that Pastor Manning made a video in which he attempted to reframe his video as not attacking our family and calling us child molestors...but simply one in which he was trying to talk about how age matters in political discourse...a complete falsehood.

However, due to complaints from Mannings viewers, Youtube put his video back up....disgusting accusations and all. We were completely flummoxed that a human being at YouTube actually watched that video and then re-approved it. Yet as angry as we were, we had resigned ourselves that there was nothing much we could do about it....until the popular political blog AmericaBlog picked up the story and highlighted the advertisers who were having their products linked to Pastor Mannings message.....prompting YouTube to immediately yank the video again and finally acknowledge that it  violates its own posted community guidelines for hate speech.

The entire Journey we have been through with Manning has highlighted for me that not only do certain religious people see the gay community as the ultimate evil...but also that it still seems to be ok to express such insulting comments as Pastor Manning made as long as the target of those comments are gay people. Read on after the jump to watch the videos and to find an answer to why it's till ok to debate and talk about gay lives in a way that it would be considered unacceptable if the subject was another race, religion, or women...

Like David and Goliath

This blog will be kind of a difficult one to write for me. I was raised...and still consider myself...Christian regardless of the path my life has taken. I will be discussing faith and religion...so if you are offended by those topics than perhaps this is not the post for you. I know that these are deeply personal topics, but I encourage anyone who reads on to be respectful and to remember that this is written from the point of view of one human being...me. It will be flawed, it may make you facepalm, but that's just the nature of discussing religion or politics, which is why people caution never to do it. Yeah...we never listen to those people. That said...

How did gay people end up being the single most important issue to religion? As I have lived my life as an out gay man, and been involved in advocating for marriage equality, I have seen this issue grow from being one of many issues the church frowned upon to somehow transforming into an apocalyptic battle for the survival of the world. It makes little sense to me. I mean, to be against it because of your interpretation of the Bible...sure, I'm used to that opinion...but to hear the way religious voices talk about the gay community is to have them paint the image of them as David facing down the us as the big mean Philistine, Goliath. There is no one else and no other issue as galvanizing to the religious community than stopping gay people....not poverty, not economical inequality, not hunger, not spiritual well being....just holding off the end times by holding back the tide of gay rights. Further more any other religious group or tradition that decides to support and affirm LGBT people gets branded as traitors and heretics.

For many this will seem like a no-brainer relationship between traditional attitudes to homosexuality being threatened by the advancements that have been made by LGBT people of late. However, rather than just accept that as a given fact...I'd like to take a minute to look deeper at why we have become the arch nemesis of organized religion and how I believe that is a mistaken view

Kids of LGBT Families In The Spotlight

It's the eve of the beginning of oral arguments for the Supreme Court on the issues of Prop 8 and DOMA and here I am on a Saturday already holding my breath. It's been a whirlwind week in which the pending cases have been front and center for us all week long. As most of you know...since our Facebook wall is practically wallpapered with links....my son Daniel's letter to Chief Justice John Roberts has gone viral and gotten a lot of attention. Thankfully, the lions share of that attention has been positive and we have been very happy to pass that along to him. I was/am very proud of him and I feel he earned every bit of the praise he has received from this.

However, when it comes to kids and the public eye, there are many who ask if showing our children in such a public way is good for them. This question was brought to me just this last week in a brief spot that Daniel and I were in for CNN's Starting Point. The one and only question I received from the anchors was nothing to with DOMA or Prop 8 but everything to do with why we as parents would chose to put our kids in the spotlight:

...Tell me a little bit about putting your family out there for the world to see. There can be down sides to that too. People can say, "Look, you're showing what it's like to be your family"....There are others who say, "Maybe kids shouldn't be in the spotlight."

It's a fair question...and one that I had a specific answer for but as a parent first and marriage equality advocate second I think the topic is one that bears further discussion. So grab your favorite beverage and follow me after the jump....