If a breast is best, why should gay dads have to settle for giving their kids the bottle? That’s the thinking that has led one French nurse to offer her services as a surrogate breast feeder. An advert, published on e-loue.com by a 29-year-old woman who self identifies as a nurse, is in French but a rough translation reads:

“I am a young mother in good health … and I’m renting out my breasts for breastfeeding infants. I’m in the Paris region and I can offer up to a dozen feeds a day for your baby. Gay men in couples are not able to breastfeed … Breastfeeding helps babies be healthier because breast milk gives babies complete nutrition.”

Read more at Care2.com

Care2 is the largest online community of people passionate about making a difference.

The post French woman offers nursing option for gay dads first appeared on Lesbian.com.

President Barack Obama surprised a gay Michigan couple with a special invite. Kent and Diego Love-Ramirez were invited by the president for a Father’s Day celebration at the White House on June 14, as the Lansing State Journal reports.

The two fathers have a two-and-a-half year old son named Lucas, whose birth they were both present for. Diego cut the umbilical cord and Kent was first to hold Lucas after his birth in 2011. What makes Obama’s invite particularly special is the fact that Michigan doesn’t have second parent adoption.

Read more at Huffington Post Gay Voices

The post Gay dads celebrate Father’s Day at White House first appeared on Lesbian.com.

In some ways, anti-gay hate groups have polished their rhetoric over the years, but often times they remind that they still believe the same old tired myths about homosexuality. At the core of this mythology is the belief that homosexuality is chosen, and thus it must be coerced from young people. That’s exactly what the Alliance Defense Fund believes was happening in Erie, Ill.

The Erie Community Unit School District had adopted some curriculum resources from GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network. Parents complained about one book in particular, Todd Parr’s “The Family Book,” which mentions on one page that “some families have two moms or two dads.” The controversy that erupted when the school board elected to remove that book and all other GLSEN materials reignited the national conservative war against GLSEN — a war against LGBT youth and the children of same-sex families.

Read more at ThinkProgress.org

The post Alliance Defense Fund still claims children can be ‘indoctrinated’ into homosexuality first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Mark Regnerus’ parenting paper, with its faulty negative claims about gay parenting, has been roundly criticized by LGBT groups and mainstream psychological organizations and widely praised by anti-gay groups, in particular the National Organization for Marriage. Regnerus’ paper was published simultaneously in Social Science Research with a brief by professor Loren Marks critiquing the American Psychological Association’s support of same-sex parenting.

Scott Rose at The New Civil Rights Movement is building a compelling case that the publication of these two papers was coordinated with anti-gay groups who would capitalize on its political implications. Here are some of the clues Rose has discovered:

• Regnerus and Marks published their pieces together, but Marks cited Regnerus’ paper, so he clearly had foreknowledge of its conclusions. This suggests it is likely they intentionally published simultaneously as a “one-two election year punch.”

Read more at ThinkProgress.org

The post Clues that publication of the anti-gay parenting ‘study’ was politically calculated first appeared on Lesbian.com.

BY STEVE WILLIAMS

The ACLU this week filed a federal lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s ban on second parent adoptions.

Second parent adoptions occur when one partner in an unmarried couple adopts the other partner’s biological or adopted children so as to be able to access the legal recognition of parenthood.

Read more at Care2.com

Care2 is the largest online community of people passionate about making a difference.

The post ACLU files suit challenging NC second parent adoptions ban first appeared on Lesbian.com.

Considerable research has shown that children of same-sex parents fare just as well as children with heterosexual parents. However, two papers published in Elsevier’s “Social Science Research”—one a comprehensive new study and one a review of existing studies—suggest insufficient data exist from which to draw any definitive conclusions.

The review by Dr. Loren Marks from Louisiana State University finds that much of the science that forms the basis for the highly regarded 2005 official brief on same-sex parenting by the American Psychological Association (APA) does not stand up to scrutiny. The new study by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus provides evidence that a number of differences in social and emotional well-being exist between young adults raised by women who have had a lesbian relationship and those who have grown up in a nuclear family.

Dr. Marks reviewed studies published between 1980 and 2005 cited by the 2005 official APA brief which asserted that: “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.”

“The jury is still out on whether being raised by same-sex parents disadvantages children,”, explains Marks. “However, the available data on which the APA draws its conclusions, derived primarily from small convenience samples, are insufficient to support a strong generalized claim either way.”

Meanwhile, Regnerus used data from the New Family Structures Study, a large nationally representative sample of approximately 3,000 young adults aged 18 to 39, to compare how children raised in eight different family structures fared on 40 social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

According to his findings, children of mothers who have had same-sex relationships were significantly different as young adults on 25 or the 40 outcome measures, compared with those who spent their entire childhood with both their married, biological parents.

Regnerus’ analysis determined that children do not “need a married mother and father to turn out well as adults, but neither does there appear to be a gay and lesbian exception to the general pattern that “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father.”

In a response intended to tease out some of the study’s implications on the gay marriage debate, Will Saletan asserts that what the study actually demonstrates is that kids from broken homes headed by gay people develop the same problems as kids from broken homes headed by straight people. Saleten contends that the study highlights the need for fewer broken homes among gays and straights and offers that gay parents owe their kids the same stability as straight parents, a compelling argument for marriage equality.

The post News: New study reopens same-sex parenting debate first appeared on Lesbian.com.