Word: parentes
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...settling into middle-class stability. They hoped, one day, to give Tyler a younger sister or brother born to April by artificial insemination. Now they feel that all their dreams, and much of their sense of family, are "on hold." The loss is all the more painful because the "parent" who challenged them was Sharon's mother...
...major ways, Tyler's story is highly unusual. Not because he has a gay parent -- so do tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of other American children and adults -- but because it ended up in court and on the evening news. The vast majority of such families live quietly, unobtrusively. When gay parents do face custody or visitation battles in court, the outcome is apt to vary from state to state -- indeed, from judge to judge or from social worker to social worker. Virginia is one of just four states where legal precedent deems gay parents unfit (Arkansas, Missouri...
...Jersey, Vermont and half a dozen other states permit a lesbian to adopt her lover's child and become a second parent. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did so last Friday, allowing surgeons Susan Love and Helen Cooksey to adopt the five-year-old girl they have raised since birth. The child was conceived by Love via artificial insemination with sperm from a cousin of Cooksey's. Because of technicalities, the child's own mother had to adopt her for Cooksey to be made co-parent. Cases like this have led judges in several states to suggest that adoption laws...
What seems certain is that the number of children who are aware they have gay parents is growing. That in turn means that gay and lesbian parents are infusing the gay civil rights movement with a sense of family virtues, making it mainstream in a way Middle America can understand. When today's children are adults, their experience of growing up with a gay parent, or having a childhood acquaintance who did, is apt to have demystified for many the otherness of gays. In sufficient numbers, that could lead to precisely the matter-of-fact outlook that gays seek...
There are only a few hundred documented cases of adoption or foster parenting by open gays. But many prospective gay parents conceal their orientation, so the actual number is surely larger. Gary Morin of Silver Spring, Maryland, found it much easier to adopt Jonathon, now 4, as a single parent than he would have as part of a gay couple. "I didn't have to worry about hiding a second person's clothes or pretending that I lived alone." Although exhausted by the demands of single parenthood combined with his job as a sign-language instructor, Morin is eager...