Married lesbian couple seeks protection in India
LUCKNOW: Even as the country debates pros and cons of legalising the same sex marriages and the Central government finds itself in a fix over the issue, a lesbian couple tied nuptial knot defying all social norms in Muzaffarnagar, known for honour killings and fundamentalist diktats by caste-based panchayats.
This is not all. Two days after the incident hit the headlines, the Muzaffarnagar district administration received another application for same sex marriage from another lesbian couple. While in the first case, officers have provided security to the newly wedded, they have not given permission to the second couple fearing a backlash from the community. Significantly, in both the cases, the couples belong to low income group and are not highly educated.
In the first case, Komal Sharma and Pinki Kashyap entered into wedlock and left their families to live together. The couple hails from Dayanand Nagar, a small locality in Shamli tehsil of Muzaffarnagar district. While Komal belongs to a Brahmin family and is educated till class XI, Pinki hails from an other backward class family and has studied only till class VIII. Komal’s father Rajendra Sharma is with home guard and Pinki’s father Hariram runs a small dairy.
The two girls met three months back in a vocational training centre where both had enrolled for a course in stitching. The friendship soon turned into love and they got secretly married through Arya Samaj rituals at a temple in Muzaffarnagar. They also to have entered wedlock legally through a court marriage in Delhi. While Pinki posed as the groom, Komal dressed as a bride.
The couple kept their marriage a secret till July 23, the day they left their families. According to police, Pinki came to Komal’s house in the morning of July 23 when Komal was alone with her two younger siblings. The duo gave sleeping pills mixed in cold drink to the Komal’s younger brother and sister and left the house. The two girls also filed an application in the office of Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Muzaffarnagar, complaining that they have threat to their lives from their families. See Married woman marries her ‘girlfriend’ in west UP Times of India
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/married-lesbi…
Gay senior lives less openly in care facility
The love of Victor Engandela’s life was a Czech immigrant, an older, square-jawed man, olive-skinned and Hollywood handsome with a shock of white hair and an unfailingly gentlemanly manner.
Joseph was his name. There are pictures of him pressed in a yellowed photo album buried on a shelf in Engandela’s room at an Evanston home for seniors.
“I was with him,” Engandela said, “until he took his final breath.”
He shares these photos, and stories of a rich life, with no one but the occasional visitor, spending most of his days isolated from his past, surrounded by contemporaries born in an age when homosexuality was taboo.
“I’m one of the few people here that’s out, and I feel the weight of that,” said Engandela, 85. “I don’t advertise it, but I feel people know I’m homosexually oriented. They like me, but they don’t like me as a homosexual. I feel shunned.”
Engandela realized he was gay when he was about 13. His parents were Sicilian immigrants, and he was raised Catholic, one of four siblings.
Rather than play with other kids, Engandela preferred sitting on the porch in his Chicago neighborhood watching the older Italian men talk and smoke cigars.
As he got older he began going to Bughouse Square, listening to poets and Marxists atop soapboxes on hot summer nights. That spot in Washington Square Park was also a covert meeting place for gays, and it was nearby, under the elevated train tracks, that he had his first homosexual experience.
“It was, really, quite beautiful,” he said. “But at that time it was a real no-no. I couldn’t talk to anybody about it.”
See Gay senior lives less openly in care facility
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/gay-senior-li…
Eve Pearlman: Curriculum battle lines drawn over values vs. bigotry in Alameda
A HOT TOPIC AROUND TOWN the last several months has been Alameda Unified School District’s proposed anti-bullying curriculum, which has been discussed with increasing fervor, and has turned into a referendum on gay rights. I admit I’d only been paying half attention to the debate (though my husband has been actively advocating for the curriculum’s adoption), until Tuesday night when I watched hours of testimony at the school board meeting, my heart dropping as a long line of speakers voiced their opposition to a few short lessons acknowledging the existence of gay and lesbian families. “It’s about sex!” the opponents claimed. But teaching about same-gender families is no more about sex than the words “marriage” and “husband” and “wife” and “wedding” are about sex. Yes, marriage is based in part on a sexual commitment, but we speak about husbands and wives all the time in a way in which sexuality is not the focus. To children, the word lesbian is no more about sex than the word marriage is. “But I want to teach my child about these things,” parents said. “I want to teach my beliefs to my child.” I have strong empathy for parents who want to impart their values to their children. But I do not have empathy when that “value” is that someone else is a lesser person. Imagine if the “value” in question were that women should not own property or that people could be owned by other people or that people with certain skin color should not be allowed to vote. These are not “values,” these are discriminatory prejudices.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the technique of the well-organized and coordinated curriculum opponents was to attack the series of lessons — designed to complement an already-established anti-bullying curriculum — on a number of technical grounds. “It’s not legal,” they said. “It doesn’t go far enough” or “It privileges one group over another.” But these attacks were contrived and disingenuous. Most curriculum opponents operated from what only few more frankly admitted: They don’t think gay families are the moral equivalent of their own straight families. They don’t think gay families are “OK” and they don’t want their kids being taught that they are. As many in this debate have done, all you have to do is switch the opponents’ arguments to another social group to see how undemocratic their viewpoints are. Would the district allow a student to opt out of a Black history lesson? A celebration of Chinese New Year? To leave the room any time divorce is discussed? Of course not. Religion has been used to support all sorts of atrocities past and present (as well as all sorts of good things). Because an argument is religion-based doesn’t mean that it is more right, more valid or more just. In this country, in this democracy, in this friendly city of 70,000, it is our shared value that all people are created equal — and to those parents who want to teach otherwise, well, this is not a “value.” It is bigotry. And it has no place in our community’s schools. It has surprised me that in this day and age, in the Bay Area, that some are so hostile to difference and so obsessed with other people’s sex lives. The aim of the Alameda school district curriculum is simple: to teach about reality in order to help children skillfully and respectfully navigate their diverse community. All families (the majority of families, in fact) don’t look like the Cleavers. Families have all sorts of configurations, incorporating grandparents and cousins, step-siblings and stepfathers, same gender couples and opposite gender couples. That is reality. Children should be taught what’s real.
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/eve-pearlman-…
ACLU Asks Court To Strike Down Arkansas Parenting Ban
At a press conference at the Arkansas State Capitol this morning, several of the plaintiffs described how Act 1, which is set to go into effect on January 1, impacts their families and why they decided to be part of the case.
Stephanie Huffman, who already adopted one child from the state in 2004, was one of the plaintiffs who spoke at today’s press conference. Huffman and her partner of 10 years, Wendy Rickman, want to adopt another child or a pair of siblings through the Department of Children and Family Services, but now can’t because of Act 1. “The state already knows we’re good enough parents that they placed one child with us before Act 1 passed,” said Huffman. “Who knows how many children are now cut off by this law from loving homes?”
In the lawsuit filed today, the ACLU argues that Act 1 violates the federal and state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process. Participating in the case are 29 adults and children from over a dozen different families, including a grandmother who lives with her same-sex partner of nine years and is the only relative able and willing to adopt her grandchild who is now in Arkansas state care, several married heterosexual couples who have relatives or friends disqualified by Act 1 who they want to adopt their children if they die, and a heterosexual woman who wants to be a foster or adoptive parent but can’t because she lives with her partner of five years. The complaint was filed this morning in Pulaski County Circuit Court.
“Ever since the election, we’ve been hearing from all corners of the state from dozens of families who are panicking about how Act 1 impacts them,” said Rita Sklar, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arkansas. “This law hurts families and children in many ways – it takes away parents’ right to decide for themselves who will adopt their children if they die, it denies the many children in Arkansas state care a chance at the largest possible pool of potential foster and adoptive homes, and denies couples who are living together but unmarried the chance to provide loving homes to children who desperately need them.”
Sheila Cole: Sheila lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with Jennifer, her partner of nine years. Sheila’s adult daughter from an earlier relationship had a baby girl in May of 2008 who was placed in the Arkansas foster care system when she was two months old. Sheila wants to adopt her granddaughter and is the relative best able to take in the baby. Every week she makes a four-hour round trip to Bentonville for two hours of visitation with her granddaughter. Sheila has taken foster parenting classes with Oklahoma’s DHS and has passed a home study. She is now waiting for approval from Arkansas, but she’s worried she might not be approved to adopt her own granddaughter because of Act 1.
Stephanie Huffman and Wendy Rickman: Stephanie and Wendy have been together for 10 years and are raising two sons together, one of whom is a 7-year-old with special needs whom Stephanie adopted from the state in 2004. Stephanie and Wendy want to adopt another child, or perhaps a pair of siblings, but can’t because of Act 1.
Cary and Trina Kelley: Cary and his wife, Trina, have two young daughters and live across the road in Fayetteville from Cary’s mother Vickie Kelley and her partner Sophia Estes. Sophia and Vickie have been together 16 years, and cumulatively have three children and six grandchildren. If anything were to happen to Cary and Trina, who held their wedding in Vickie and Sophia’s backyard, they want Vickie and Sophia to be able to adopt their children. Trina, Cary’s wife, spent many years of her childhood in state care and she feels very strongly that children who need homes shouldn’t be cut off from loving relatives like Sophia and Vickie.
Kaytee Wright: Kaytee Wright lives on a farm in Cabot with her partner of five years, Alan Leveritt. Kaytee helps Alan raise his eight-year-old daughter from his previous marriage, of whom he has joint custody. Together she and Alan are also providing a home and financial assistance to a mother and her two young children through a Little Rock shelter for the working homeless. Kaytee was adopted from state care when she was just four weeks old, and she feels very strongly that good homes should be provided to children in the state system. Kaytee would like to adopt a child but cannot because she and Alan aren’t married.
For a complete list of all the plaintiff families and more detailed profiles, please visit http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/parenting/38199res20081230.html
The plaintiffs are represented by Christine P. Sun, Rose Saxe, and Leslie Cooper of the American Civil Liberties Union, Stacey Friedman, Garrard Beeney, and Jennifer Sheinfeld of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and Marie-Bernarde Miller and Daniel J. Beck of Williams & Anderson PLC on behalf of the ACLU Foundation of Arkansas.
The case is Cole, et al. v. Arkansas, et al. For more information on the case, including today’s complaint, visit http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/parenting/38199res20081230.html
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/aclu-asks-cou…
