Moms can't marry, and kids take issue
Moms can't marry, and kids take issue
By Lee Romney
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times
Published October 23, 2006
Taped to Gavin McNeely Odabashian's bedroom wall is her "Hall of Hotties," where a red paper heart marked "husband" accords special status to heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal.
"Dark hair, blue eyes, kind of scruffy," said Gavin, 15, listing her top hottie qualities recently as she settled in with her Spanish homework.
Downstairs, 12-year-old Baylor McNeely Odabashian hunkered in front of his "Gettysburg" computer game, remaking Confederate history in slippers he pilfered from his sister. A Darth Vader poster hangs on his bedroom wall next to one showing a dove of peace.
The siblings have a life many might envy: A 3-year-old golden retriever named Eli and a couple of parakeets named Fleebus and Zeus II. Private schools that challenge them academically and socially. And two loving parents who will soon celebrate their 20th anniversary.
But Gavin and Baylor's parents cannot marry. They are lesbians, known in this 1911 California Craftsman south of San Francisco as "mommy" and "mama." (A simple hollered "mom" will do if the request is generic.)
That makes these children supporting actors in one of the modern era's most contentious legal and social dramas.
In California, an appeals court this month upheld the prohibition on same-sex marriage in a case that will head to the state Supreme Court.
Largely missing from the discussion are the voices of children like Gavin and Baylor, who are part of such families regardless of the law.
Vowed to raise a family
Gavin and Baylor's mothers, Ash McNeely, vice president of a community foundation, and Elisa Odabashian, West Coast director of Consumers Union, vowed to raise a family shortly after they drafted the commitment pledge that hangs on their living-room wall.
Each gave birth to one child, using the same sperm donor, a family friend. Each adopted the other's child, making them the first same-sex couple to do so in San Mateo County, Calif., after the state's Supreme Court confirmed that right.
Nationwide, more than a quarter of a million children were being raised by same-sex couples that year, an analysis of U.S. Census data shows.
On a recent evening, Gavin bounded around the kitchen in her volleyball shorts, prodding her moms for advice on how to microwave a yam.
If she is the emotional one, her sails filling without warning, Baylor is the rudder, steady to his core. He is "wicked smart," his sister offered, explaining why his last school bored him--a description he rejected in favor of a specific accounting of the school's failings.
With blond hair and a "nerds have more fun" motto, he is also the "political one," Odabashian said, whose "righteous-indignation factor" has given him a strong sense of self.
"Even my braces are trying to make me straight," Baylor joked of the biases that compel him to chastise schoolmates. "I want gay teeth!"
Theirs is an open banter, with feelings and opinions easily shared. Still, the children are growing up with a sense of "otherness" outside their home.
"I never experienced anyone saying, `Oh, Gavin has two moms. She's weird,'" Gavin said. "But that's what I was always afraid of."
Even in preschool, she said, she remembers having to explain the two Mother's Day cards she was making. And kindergartners were perplexed by her family drawing.
By elementary school, she avoided the lunchroom, worried that kids would "say something horrible about her family," Odabashian recalled. At 10, she told her parents she felt like Martin Luther King Jr. (Odabashian assured her that "mommy and I are Martin Luther King, not you.")
I was trapped'
"I was trapped between what the world thought and what I knew about my family," Gavin said, munching on her yam.
Her new school -- private, small and tolerant--has helped. Students attend diversity and homophobia workshops. Last year, the freshmen made a pact never to use the expression "that's so gay."
Baylor's path was different--forged by indignation. On the 4th-grade playground, he learned that two girls had taunted others who were holding hands, calling them lesbians.
"My moms are lesbians," Baylor forcefully told the perpetrators. "Why is that an insult?"
When a playground monitor told the girls not to "insult people," Baylor reddened further. "Why do you think of it as an insult?" he demanded, yelling at the parent not to do it again.
So what of marriage? For most of their lives, the kids said, they have perceived their parents as equal to married while facing constant reminders that they aren't.
When McNeely and Odabashian broke the news of the appellate court ruling, Baylor launched into an analysis of civil rights law that he said showed the justices erred.
Gavin stared at her plate for a long time. Then, she spoke.
"That's stupid," she said softly.
- - -
Good for kids? Some say yes, others no
The debate over whether same-sex marriage would help or harm children of the unions has raged fiercely in and out of the courts:
PRO
The American Academy of Pediatrics has backed same-sex marriage rights, concluding in a recent research review that children of the unions fare just as well as those in heterosexual households and noting that marriage enhances family stability. The American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytical Association and other such groups have issued similar statements.
"Those data that do exist are monotonously positive," said Dr. Ellen Perrin, a pediatrics professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the pediatrics academy's paper. "Variables like the sharing of responsibilities between the parents are much more important to how the kids do than whether the parents are heterosexual [or] homosexual."
CON
Opponents of the unions counter that studies of children of gay men and lesbians are flawed by small sample size and investigator bias. They point to studies focusing on children of heterosexuals that show those who stayed with their biological mothers and fathers did best. Research on parenting differences between mothers and fathers support the notion that children need both, they add.
"A just, compassionate society should never intentionally create a motherless or fatherless family," said Bill Maier, vice president of Colorado-based Focus on the Family and a family psychologist who has written a book arguing against same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting.
By Lee Romney
Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times
Published October 23, 2006
Taped to Gavin McNeely Odabashian's bedroom wall is her "Hall of Hotties," where a red paper heart marked "husband" accords special status to heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal.
"Dark hair, blue eyes, kind of scruffy," said Gavin, 15, listing her top hottie qualities recently as she settled in with her Spanish homework.
Downstairs, 12-year-old Baylor McNeely Odabashian hunkered in front of his "Gettysburg" computer game, remaking Confederate history in slippers he pilfered from his sister. A Darth Vader poster hangs on his bedroom wall next to one showing a dove of peace.
The siblings have a life many might envy: A 3-year-old golden retriever named Eli and a couple of parakeets named Fleebus and Zeus II. Private schools that challenge them academically and socially. And two loving parents who will soon celebrate their 20th anniversary.
But Gavin and Baylor's parents cannot marry. They are lesbians, known in this 1911 California Craftsman south of San Francisco as "mommy" and "mama." (A simple hollered "mom" will do if the request is generic.)
That makes these children supporting actors in one of the modern era's most contentious legal and social dramas.
In California, an appeals court this month upheld the prohibition on same-sex marriage in a case that will head to the state Supreme Court.
Largely missing from the discussion are the voices of children like Gavin and Baylor, who are part of such families regardless of the law.
Vowed to raise a family
Gavin and Baylor's mothers, Ash McNeely, vice president of a community foundation, and Elisa Odabashian, West Coast director of Consumers Union, vowed to raise a family shortly after they drafted the commitment pledge that hangs on their living-room wall.
Each gave birth to one child, using the same sperm donor, a family friend. Each adopted the other's child, making them the first same-sex couple to do so in San Mateo County, Calif., after the state's Supreme Court confirmed that right.
Nationwide, more than a quarter of a million children were being raised by same-sex couples that year, an analysis of U.S. Census data shows.
On a recent evening, Gavin bounded around the kitchen in her volleyball shorts, prodding her moms for advice on how to microwave a yam.
If she is the emotional one, her sails filling without warning, Baylor is the rudder, steady to his core. He is "wicked smart," his sister offered, explaining why his last school bored him--a description he rejected in favor of a specific accounting of the school's failings.
With blond hair and a "nerds have more fun" motto, he is also the "political one," Odabashian said, whose "righteous-indignation factor" has given him a strong sense of self.
"Even my braces are trying to make me straight," Baylor joked of the biases that compel him to chastise schoolmates. "I want gay teeth!"
Theirs is an open banter, with feelings and opinions easily shared. Still, the children are growing up with a sense of "otherness" outside their home.
"I never experienced anyone saying, `Oh, Gavin has two moms. She's weird,'" Gavin said. "But that's what I was always afraid of."
Even in preschool, she said, she remembers having to explain the two Mother's Day cards she was making. And kindergartners were perplexed by her family drawing.
By elementary school, she avoided the lunchroom, worried that kids would "say something horrible about her family," Odabashian recalled. At 10, she told her parents she felt like Martin Luther King Jr. (Odabashian assured her that "mommy and I are Martin Luther King, not you.")
I was trapped'
"I was trapped between what the world thought and what I knew about my family," Gavin said, munching on her yam.
Her new school -- private, small and tolerant--has helped. Students attend diversity and homophobia workshops. Last year, the freshmen made a pact never to use the expression "that's so gay."
Baylor's path was different--forged by indignation. On the 4th-grade playground, he learned that two girls had taunted others who were holding hands, calling them lesbians.
"My moms are lesbians," Baylor forcefully told the perpetrators. "Why is that an insult?"
When a playground monitor told the girls not to "insult people," Baylor reddened further. "Why do you think of it as an insult?" he demanded, yelling at the parent not to do it again.
So what of marriage? For most of their lives, the kids said, they have perceived their parents as equal to married while facing constant reminders that they aren't.
When McNeely and Odabashian broke the news of the appellate court ruling, Baylor launched into an analysis of civil rights law that he said showed the justices erred.
Gavin stared at her plate for a long time. Then, she spoke.
"That's stupid," she said softly.
- - -
Good for kids? Some say yes, others no
The debate over whether same-sex marriage would help or harm children of the unions has raged fiercely in and out of the courts:
PRO
The American Academy of Pediatrics has backed same-sex marriage rights, concluding in a recent research review that children of the unions fare just as well as those in heterosexual households and noting that marriage enhances family stability. The American Psychiatric Association, American Psychoanalytical Association and other such groups have issued similar statements.
"Those data that do exist are monotonously positive," said Dr. Ellen Perrin, a pediatrics professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the pediatrics academy's paper. "Variables like the sharing of responsibilities between the parents are much more important to how the kids do than whether the parents are heterosexual [or] homosexual."
CON
Opponents of the unions counter that studies of children of gay men and lesbians are flawed by small sample size and investigator bias. They point to studies focusing on children of heterosexuals that show those who stayed with their biological mothers and fathers did best. Research on parenting differences between mothers and fathers support the notion that children need both, they add.
"A just, compassionate society should never intentionally create a motherless or fatherless family," said Bill Maier, vice president of Colorado-based Focus on the Family and a family psychologist who has written a book arguing against same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting.
posted by Carlos T Mock @ 8:17 AM
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