Scouts and LGBTQ Families

From my blog posting on www.parentsociety.com:
During my young childhood, the group that had my nearly undivided attention (besides church) was my Cub Scout troop, hosted by the United Methodist Church we attended.
I happily donned my royal blue uniform, with all its cloth badges and appliqués, and yellow kerchief. But the Cub Scouts was not just a solo experience: it was a family affair. My Mom was a dutiful Pack Mom, hosting our pack when it was her turn to provide activities, freshly baked cookies, and milk. My Mom and Dad proudly watched our Cub Scout pack march in neighborhood parades, and supported our civic projects. My Dad took an active interest in helping me with my balsa-wood airplanes and race cars, and was delighted to lead our group of Webelos in my last year of Cub Scouts.
We learned to tie knots, and picked up other skills that we would find helpful on camping trips. While I was smitten with the world of Scouts early on, when I was thirteen years old I chose to become a Civil Air Patrol cadet instead of a Boy Scout because of my love of flying.
Much has changed since I left the Cub Scouts and became a parent. As a parent, I would have enjoyed participating with my daughter if she were to have become a Girl Scout, and with my son were he to have chosen to become a Boy Scout. While the Girl Scouts are open and accepting of young Scouts who are lesbian and their lesbian moms, the Boy Scouts’ story has been a different one. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Boy Scouts of America could bar any activity by gay Scouts or LGBTQ parents because the Scouts are a private organization. On July 17, 2012, after a secretive two-year review of their policy toward gay Scouts and LGBTQ parents, the Boy Scouts reaffirmed its policy to exclude gays from joining or being leaders.
Read more on: http://www.parentsociety.com/todays-family/same-sex-parents/the-scouts-and-same-sex-parents/

The Politics of Food/Parent Society

During my early career as a music therapist, my social consciousness was shaped by discussions about Nestle food products in less economically developed countries in the 1970s. Nestle makes many things children love to eat, especially chocolate, baby foods, cereal, and cookies.
The problem for many of us was Nestle’s encouraging families to wean infants from breastfeeding to infant formula made by Nestle. We know that breast milk has great nutritional value for young infants. The Nestle formula had to be mixed with water — which may be contaminated in some poorer countries — and required fuel to boil the water for the formula itself and sterilization of bottles. In response to Nestle’s infant formula campaign, many socially aware people around the world boycotted all Nestle products, including chocolate milk, in hopes that Nestle would change its ways. That boycott continues to this very day.
Food and politics remain part and parcel of modern family life around the world. We buy food at the farmer’s market, neighborly country store, health food store, or supermarket. The owners of these establishments earn a profit from our purchases, reinvesting that money in their business and community. Sometimes the owner contributes to a social or political cause dear to the heart of the owner. There are those owners who also understand that supporting a candidate or cause is a politically savvy move.
Read more on: http://www.parentsociety.com/todays-family/same-sex-parents/the-politics-of-food-and-family/

Fathers' Day

My first blog with parentsociety.com on LGBTQIA parenting.  Engjoy!

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Fathers’ Day

Brett Webb-Mitchell

            Twenty-four years ago, my family status went from “married, no children,” to “married, with one child.” My daughter’s birth in a hospital in London, England was a gift to her mom and I. We celebrated her birth with enthusiasm, complete with flowers, balloons, and Guinness Stout (it was England, after all). My daughter’s birth was my inauguration into the lesser-celebrated holiday of “Fathers’ Day.”  As best as I can figure it out, husbands and fathers who were envious of Mothers’ Day created Fathers’ Day at the turn of the last century.  Call it father’s envy.

            I remember holding my sweet daughter close to my body, her small arms and legs moving slightly because she was wrapped tightly in large, warmed blankets.  Deep inside me I knew that her life was going to be nothing like my life, and I almost wanted to apologize to her then and there.  I wistfully told her to be ready for the ride of her life. While straight white parents in a middle-class suburb of Portland, Oregon, raised me, my daughter would have a life that was radically different than mine. It all has to do with who I am: at the time of her birth, I lived two lives: one life was as a husband, father, Presbyterian pastor, doctoral student and rising scholar who was trying to live out his parents dreams for his success. The other life was one in the closet as a gay man who lived a life filled with apprehension and an overwhelming sense of self-doubt.

Read more on://www.parentsociety.com/uncategorized/fathers-day/

North Carolina vs. Mississippi

My take on what is happening among the silent majority in the latest issue of Q Notes (goqnotes.com).

After the vote on Amendment One was held and passed by the citizens of North Carolina, Governor Beverly Perdue spoke out about what we, as a state, looked like to the rest of the nation: “People around the country are watching the state and are confused…North Carolina was a progressive and a forward thinking state that stood up for civil rights…we look like Mississippi” (May 11, 2012).
The comment raised a reaction from both those who voted for and against the Amendment. Those who voted for the Amendment, along with Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, took great umbrage at the comment. Those who voted against the Amendment wondered where Gov. Perdue was while some of us were working on phone banks, going door to door and distributing material against Amendment One. To this day Gov. Perdue has not come out in support of marriage equality, having voted for the state Defense of Marriage Act when she was a state legislator.
In light of the passage of Amendment One — now part of North Carolina’s Constitution — it is interesting to note one thing about the population of Mississippi that surpasses that of North Carolina’s citizenry. Although Mississippi ranks 42nd in the nation for the number of same-sex couples per household, it leads the nation in the percentage of same-sex couples raising children, a study by the Williams Institute (a gender orientation and identity public-policy organization based at the University of California, Los Angeles) reported. Nationally, 22 percent of same-sex couples are raising children, but in Mississippi 33 percent are raising children. Mississippi has a total of 6,286 same-sex couples” (Jackson (MS) Free Press, Aug. 26, 2011). Mississippi!? That means there are more same-sex couples with children who feel safe, if not comfortable, living in Mississippi than the once-progressive-but-always-conservative state of North Carolina. Maybe it has to do with the cost of living, the “live and let live” or regardless of your politics, or who you live with, “blood is thicker than water” attitude of some Southerners. Perhaps it is the quieter rural, backwater life some people have chosen to live, being honest and smart about who knows about one’s relationship with a partner and child or children.
This fact about Mississippi reminds me of something I do not want to forget in light of North Carolina’s Amendment One’s passage. While, for some same-sex couples and their children, there are many advantages to living in the thriving metropolitan parts of North Carolina, we live in a state of 100 counties, where there are many same-sex couples and children who live in one of the 6900 small cities, towns, villages and rural hamlets in N.C. Same-sex couples in Robbinsville, Lincolnton and Warrenton, as well as those who live in rural parts on a farm or in the mountains of this state also felt the impact of the Amendment’s passage, but chose to be quiet about expressing resentment, if not downright anger, about how the vote went down.
A story: When I was interim senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church, Henderson (an hour’s ride north of Raleigh in rural Vance County), I was delighted to meet lesbian and gay couples raising children side by side straight couples with children. They worked in the surrounding county, paid taxes, joined swim-golf clubs and contributed to the community life. Discovering that I was a Presbyterian pastor who is gay, they even started to come to worship to check both the congregation and me out. Granted, there was an unspoken, but firmly held “don’t ask, don’t tell” etiquette that guides all conversations. But, they were there, queer and happy.
Our sisters and brothers who are lesbian and gay are in each and every county of Mississippi and North Carolina, no matter how big or small, liberal or conservative, the county may be. We who are LGBTQ are everywhere and our numbers are growing. We are part of the rich, vibrant life of not only the large cities, but the small farms, county public schools and the small independent coffee shop with the only espresso machine in the county. Along with our children, being smart and honest, we will continue to educate, share our lives, our relationships and slowly, but decisively, change the very fabric of the places where we live. : :

Link is here:

goqnotes.com/15214/north-carolina-vs-mississippi/

Pace!

B

Q Notes Article: Teaching Our Children to Vote

was riding in the back seat of my parents’ white Buick Le Sabre, as my mom pulled into the large fairgrounds in New Jersey, leaving my dad at a rally for Lyndon B. Johnson for president. In 1964 I was nine years old and to this day I remember the tension in the car between my parents riding in the front seat of the car. My mom was and is a “cloth coat Republican” just like Pat Nixon; a regular “Rockefeller Republican,” even though I hasten to share the information that that branch of the modern GOP is, well, a relic of its collective past. She was going to vote for Sen. Goldwater for president and she was furious with my dad because he was going to vote for Johnson. If memory serves me correctly, that was the last time my mom and dad voted against each other. Since then, my brother and I canceled out my parents’ vote, voting solidly the Democratic Party line.
Politics was and is part of my family discussion topics at dinnertime when I was growing up, as was religion and other current events of the day. “The McLoughlin Group” and later “Washington Week” were part of our television viewing habit. While my parents usually lean to the Republican right on talking points — with my mom fixed to Fox newscasts — it nonetheless gave my brother and I something to hone our skills as debaters and intellectuals. If we weren’t going to follow their political thinking, then we (like generations of children before us) would have to think logically about where we either agreed or diverged from what our parents thought. Separately, but around the same time, my brother and I came “out” to my parents and told them that we were Democrats. Frankly, this may have upset my mom more than telling her I was gay.
Habits and interests in our adult lives are formed early in our childhood. Knowing this, I watched carefully and with tenderness as I worked at an early voting election site in early May. I observed a mom pushing an infant in a stroller with one hand, while holding the hand of a slightly older child with the other hand, and a dad precariously balancing a child on their shoulders into the voting booth. What soon turned out to be the hot ticket item at our table was a round blue teal sticker that said “I Voted Against Amendment 1!”
All morning long, children and adults alike began to wear stickers against Amendment One. For anyone reading this outside of N.C., Amendment One will amend our Constitution declaring that the only legally recognized union is only marriage between one man and one woman. One child put the sticker in the middle of the “S” of his Superman T-shirt, while a little girl simply placed the sticker on her arm, complementing the sticker on the other arm that she got from Trader Joe’s. Moms and dads also wore the stickers on their clothes as they walked into the voting area, showing others that they were going to vote against Amendment One. In this classroom of life, parents were teaching their children that politics matter, can be fun and is important enough that a mom or dad would interrupt one’s daily schedule of fun activities to practice a civil right: the right to vote. Parents are teaching children that voting matters in our collective life and is important for the greater good of the diverse community in which we live.
Later in the day, my 19-year-old son texted me, telling me that he voted. My daughter had already voted too. Regardless of the outcome of this election, a lesson has been learned: vote. And, where did they learn to vote? From their parents, who learned in from their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents before us. : :

Voting Gone to the Dogs

My latest in Chapel Hill News:
“Can you bring your dogs up on campus to help bring out the vote?” asked our friend Chris.
My partner and I were confused at first, muttering to ourselves, “Our dogs? The vote?” What would Lil (our queen-like, 12-year old yellow Lab) and Toby (our overly rambunctious, 11 year-old chocolate Lab) do in order to help bring out the vote against Amendment One on the UNC campus? Simply wag a tail, convince students they’d love to be their best friend as they are gently nuzzled, told, “Aren’t you a pretty pup?!” and someone directs them to the voting booth a few yards away.
As so many dog owners know, dogs have a way of making us feel like we are “Number One” in a world regardless of what others say. There’s simply nothing like coming home at the end of the day and being greeted by dogs that seem to say, “Where have you been? We’ve missed you! Now come and play with us, OK?” as their tail wags their bodies in an overly exuberant sign of welcome. There is a certain attraction that is undeniable between humans and these furry bundles of love and drool.
The dogs and I found Chris and her crew of volunteers working against Amendment One, planting signs to “VOTE!” with red, white, and blue balloons tied onto the signs on a lovely Friday in April. They greeted the dogs with warmth and joy, placed a kiss on the wet nose of each dog, a bowl of cold water (ice included!), and a treat or two for each pup (the dogs were in their idea of heaven).
Without needing to say a thing, or advertise with a sign, “Dogs here to pet,” the magic took place: students simply started coming up to the dogs, like iron filings to a magnet. They pet their head with the accompanying, “Ah, aren’t you cute?! What’s your name?” Within minutes, Chris placed a thin scarf of an American flag around each dogs neck with a teal blue button pinned on simply stating: “Vote Against Amendment One!” The dogs didn’t mind the scarves one bit. After all, their attention was on marking out the new surroundings, their respective noses in the air catching aromatic whiffs of food near by.
More students, and then a faculty or staff member, slowed down from their brisk walk between the dining hall and the next appointment or rush to study. There it was again: without a cue they petted a dog, scratched under their chin, rubbed the area behind their ears, and spoke baby talk to them, “Hi sweetie!” Chris and her merry band of volunteers dove in and invited students, faculty, and staff alike to vote against Amendment One inside UNC’s Chase Hall, only a few feet away from dog-petting central.
For six hours the dogs did their best impersonation of being, well, dogs, and the voter numbers grew throughout the day. Needless to say, the dogs were exhausted by the end of the day, heavy panting out of both of them, and from their deep snores I knew they slept well that night.
In hindsight, I get it: voting is stressful work. The right to vote comes with a sense of gravitas. Years ago I was in the Dominican Republic during a tense election day, with police posted outside of voting areas for fear of violence as people put their lives on the line simply to vote. Sadly, many adults here do not take the opportunity to vote. They find it easier to grouse about the poor economy or get angry with a new law passed rather than taking a few minutes to stop, vote, and make a difference.
Elections matter. Who we elect changes the course of our collective history.
With all the seriousness of doing our duty as citizens of this country, it is great to have a dog outside of the voting booth to simply cut down the stress all sides feel during an election. Dogs are a welcoming presence, great stress relievers, reminding us that we did the right thing.
If the person we voted for and our fight against the Amendment wins, we will celebrate with our dogs (extra treats!)
And if we lose? With a dog to accompany us, we move forward, working anew to make a better change for our future.

Crunch time

I signed up today to work the polls for early voting tomorrow, Friday, May 4th, in Hillsborough.  I will work at a phone bank on May 6.  I may work the polls on May 8th.

This is crunch time.

I'm amazed at how swept up I am in the work, but this work is personal and familial.

Friends from the West have written about the "cracker" state of North Carolina. The youtube clip of the wife of one of the co-sponsors that put this Amendment on the ballot, promoting the idea that passage of this Amendment will help Caucasians pro-create did not help those for the Amendment.  Nor did the ravings of the Rev. Sean Harris of Fayettevill, NC (Berean Baptist Church), promoting beating our children into heterosexuality.

The simple question, as I would ask in my Ethics class re: the right moral choice, is based on consequentialism: will passage of this Amendment bring the greatest good for the greater number of people? 

Simply: no.

Pace, Brett

Brett