Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

LGBT's Living With Disabilities: Also Here, Also Queer

Excerpt from: Huffington Post (click for full article)

 

I have always had a special place in my heart for people with disabilities. One of my best friends from college has a brother with a severe mental illness and over the years, as we became closer, he became more like a brother to me as well. I've always known that people with mental and physical disabilities clearly have a much harder time than the rest of us. Something that we take for granted, such as easily getting out of bed in the morning can end up being an excruciating process for people with disabilities. Knowing this, I often wondered what it was like for members for the LGBT community with disabilities. As a gay man myself, I know how focused other gay men can be on the aesthetic when choosing a partner and I also know that navigating your way through the community can tricky, even when you can walk on your own two feet. I recently sat down with Andrew Morrison-Gurza, a 28 year old gay male who lives in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada. Andrew is a grad student who is finishing his MA in Legal Studies with a concentration on Disability and currently looking for work. Andrew has spastic quadriplegic Cerebral Palsy. He cannot walk and uses an electric powered wheelchair to get around.

Jon Stewart Blasts Gay Marriage Opposition In DOMA Supreme Court Hearing (VIDEO)

Excerpt from: Huffington Post (click for full article)

 

 

Ellen's mum: Not supporting gay marriage is bullying

Excerpt from: Bendigo Advertiser (click for full article)

 

Betty DeGeneres, 82, is a gay rights campaigner and the mother of the world's most famous lesbian, not necessarily in that order.

Ellen DeGeneres has a TV audience of at least 4 million viewers per episode in the US alone and is here in Australia to film segments for her show.

Betty is here, too, and addressed a PFLAG meeting at Westmead last Saturday. PFLAG is a worldwide organisation providing information and support to the families and friends of gay and lesbians.*

Betty says it was hard enough for Ellen to come out once, at age 20, to her family – let alone a second time, in her 30s, to 36 million people. That time it almost cost her everything.

What Classic Sitcoms Taught Us About Gay Rights

Excerpt from: The Daily Beast (click for full article)

 

Before Hillary Clinton, Rob Portman, and President Obama were championing gay marriage, Sophia Petrillo, Julia Sugarbaker, and Mrs. Garrett were equal-rights crusaders. Over the past decade, TV audiences met Will and Grace, cried with Kurt on Glee and were introduced to The New Normal. But long before those comedies hammered home the point that being gay is OK, a handful of progressive classic sitcoms interrupted the laughs to preach to audiences about loving thy neighbor no matter who they love.

As the Supreme Court takes on the second day of arguments in landmark same-sex marriage cases, here’s a topical look back at what The Golden Girls, Designing Women, and more taught us about gay rights.

ABA AMICUS BRIEF SUPPORTS REPEAL OF DOMA

Today the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments and review the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act with the case, United States v. Windsor, et al.  The Section of Individual Rights and Responsibilities sponsored the American Bar Association's amicus brief in the Windsor case.  The brief was drafted pro bono by a team of lawyers, led by Harry Sandick, at the firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.  Yesterday, the Court heard arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry, No. 12-144 to determine whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits the State of California from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The ABA Windsor brief asks the U.S. Supreme Court to consider the "serious obstacles" that Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act imposes on lawyer's clients who are same-sex couples legally married under state law.  The brief describes Section 3’s impact on the federal rights and responsibilities of these clients in areas that include retirement and estate planning, health care, taxation, military benefits, ethical obligations and immigration. The brief advises that Section 3, which defines marriage as only between one man and one woman, results in unprecedented and discriminatory burdens on legally married same-sex couples that are inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee of equal protection.

The brief also cites the ABA’s advocacy over the past 40 years to eliminate discrimination against gays and lesbians. To read the full brief, click here.

Pentagon to extend certain benefits to same-sex spouses

Excerpt from: Washington Post (click for full article)

 

The Pentagon has decided to extend new benefits to the spouses of gay personnel, according to officials and people notified about the decision, responding to the increasingly vocal appeals of same-sex couples in the military.

The new benefits may include housing privileges, access to base recreational facilities and joint duty assignments for uniformed couples, but legal experts say the Pentagon is unlikely to find a way to offer health-care coverage and more than 100 other spousal benefits while the Defense of Marriage Act — which defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman — remains in effect.

Where can a child have three parents?

Excerpt from: Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (click for full article)

 

Today's newspapers and websites are full of stories about the California bill that will allow a judge to find that a child has three parents. (Check out the New York Times for example).  Every story I read contains something that is misleading or plain wrong about the state of the law.  So I thought I would briefly try to set the record straight.  Mind you, I am not criticizing the journalists who wrote these pieces, as this area is complex and can be very hard to explain.  But I'm going to give it a try.

Kansas Presses Sperm Donor To Pay Child Support

Excerpt from: NPR (click for full article)

 

A Kansas man's decision to donate sperm to help a lesbian couple conceive a child in 2009 has landed him in a complicated legal case, as a state agency is now pursuing him for child support payments. William Marotta, 46, is asking a judge to dismiss the case, which has grabbed national attention.

"In 1994, the state of Kansas passed a law regulating sperm donorship that said a person was not responsible" as a parent, Hrenchir tells Robert, "as long as they had a medical doctor carry out the insemination. A medical doctor was not used for this particular insemination."

The state law is based on the idea that a doctor can certify that the donor is in fact not connected with the child's mother — "and not, for example, a boyfriend who's posing as a sperm donor, but should actually be required to help support the child."

The issue came to the state's attention when Schreiner applied for Medicaid. She eventually gave the donor contract to a caseworker. The Kansas Department for Children and Families is now seeking to have him named the father of the child, and thus liable for child support.

Author's childhood with dyslexia, stories on deaf community lead to book about children who have little in common with their parents

Excerpt from: Media dis&dat (click for full article)

 

Andrew Solomon’s enormous new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” is about children who are born or who grow up in ways their parents never expected. It’s a subject Mr. Solomon knows from experience. He was dyslexic as a child and struggled to learn to read. As he described in “The Noonday Demon,” which won a National Book Award in 2001, he once suffered from crippling, suicidal depressions. And Mr. Solomon is gay, which made his parents so uncomfortable that as a teenager he visited sexual surrogates in the hopes of “curing” himself. 

Mr. Solomon, 49, is also different — different from most writers, anyway — in that he is independently wealthy and lives in baronial splendor in a West Village town house that once belonged to Emma Lazarus, who, though she wrote about those poor, huddled masses, was not herself among them. The book party for “Far From the Tree” was held not in some editor’s cramped Upper West Side apartment but at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Mr. Solomon has recently been named a trustee.

His other great discovery, he added, was joy. He had been prepared to encounter sadness in the families he visited; what surprised him was how much love there was. “This book’s conundrum,” he writes, “is that most of the families described here ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.” 

Reviewing “Far From the Tree” in The Times, Dwight Garner said, “This is a book that shoots arrow after arrow into your heart.” But it’s also a frightening and disturbing book. Its chapters are a vivid catalog of all the things that can go wrong in giving birth to and then bring up a child, and also raise difficult ethical questions: whether it’s proper to give cochlear implants to deaf children or to subject dwarfs to painful limb-lengthening surgery, for example.

2d Circuit: Denial of Estate Tax Marital Deduction to Same-Sex Couple Violates Equal Protection

Excerpt from: TaxProf Blog (click for full article, with details)

The Second Circuit yesterday held that the denial of an estate tax marital deduction to the surviving spouse of a lesbian couple under the Defense of Marriage Act violates the equal protection clause. In dissent, Judge Straub argued that if the historical understanding of marriage in the United States is to be changed, "I believe it is for the American people to do so." Windsor v. United States, No. 12-2335 (2d Cir. Oct. 19, 2012).