Month: August 2018

Supreme Court Stays Out of Case on Gay Rights and Foster Care

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The Supreme Court refused on Thursday to intercede in a dispute between Philadelphia and a Catholic foster care agency that does not work with same-sex couples.

The city imposed a freeze on placements with the agency, Catholic Social Services, after an article in March in The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on its policy against placing children with same-sex couples. The agency and several foster parents sued the city in May, saying the move had violated their First Amendment rights to religious freedom and free speech.Anthony Kennedy retirement

A federal judge ruled against the agency in July, and an appeals court refused to order that placements be resumed while the appeal moves forward.

In asking the Supreme Court to step in, the agency said it could face dire consequences. “Without intervention,” the agency’s emergency application said, “the city’s intake freeze will force Catholic’s foster care program to close.”

The Supreme Court’s brief order gave no reasons for denying the request. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch said they would have granted it.

The agency said the dispute with the city was hypothetical, as it had not been approached by a same-sex couple seeking to be foster parents. Were that to happen, the agency said, it would refer the couple to one of many other foster care groups that work in Philadelphia.

“Whether or not Catholic’s program remains open,” the agency wrote, “there will be the same number of agencies in Philadelphia that serve L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.”

The case, the latest clash between anti-discrimination principles and claims of conscience, reached the justices at a preliminary stage and may yet return to them.

The case, Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, No. 18A118, is broadly similar to that of a Colorado baker who refused to create a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.

by Adma Liptak, New York Times, August 30, 2018

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Source: Time for Families

Catholic Charities ending foster, adoption programs over same-sex marriage rule

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Catholic Charities of Buffalo will end its foster care and adoption program because state rules that bar discrimination based on sexual orientation conflict with church teachings, officials from the organization said Thursday.

“We’re a Catholic organization, so we have to practice what we do consistent with the teaching of the church,” Dennis C. Walczyk, the chief executive officer of Catholic Charities, told The News.

A same-sex couple recently applied to the agency to become adoptive foster parents, and that precipitated the agency’s decision, Walczyk said.

The agency has a contract with the Erie County Department of Social Services that expires in March. The state Office of Children and Family Services licenses Catholic Charities and other providers of these services.

The state requires contracting organizations to allow same-sex couples to adopt or to raise foster children. That directive, however, goes against the church’s position that marriage is between a man and a woman, the Catholic Charities officials said.

Given that tension, the agency made the decision to phase out the foster care and adoption program.

“It is with deep sadness we acknowledge that the legacy of the high quality, exceptional services which our staff provides to children and families through foster care and adoption will be lost,”  Walczyk said in a statement formally announcing the end of the services. “We are working with the state OCFS and Erie County DSS to support a smooth transition for children in foster care and foster parents, as well as those who have submitted applications to provide foster care or seek adoption.”

Catholic Charities said the program currently has 55 certified foster homes, with 34 children in care in 24 of those homes.

“They will stay with their parents,” Walczyk said of the children currently placed through Catholic Charities. “They will stay in their homes.”

But eventually they will be under the auspices of another agency.

August 23, 2018, By Stephen T. Watson By Harold McNeil

BuffaloNews.com

Click here to read that entire article.

 

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Source: Time for Families

How Companies Make It Harder for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Employees to Achieve Work-Life Balance

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Companies have been paying closer attention to work-family conflict and work-life balance over the last several decades.

In many successful organizations, there is a heavy investment in offering programs that give employees more job-related flexibility, time for personal activities, and convenience. By promoting a positive work-family culture, employers are able to maintain a happier, healthier, and more committed workforce, which contributes to the bottom line.citizenship

But are companies missing something when it comes to addressing issues of work and family? Our research says that they are, and it could be a big problem from a diversity and inclusion perspective.

Recently, we conducted a qualitative study in which we interviewed 53 lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) employees in the U.S. across various industries and job types. Specifically, we asked about their work-family experiences at their current organizations. Our study was motivated by the observation that, since its inception more than 30 years ago, research on work-family conflict in organizations has assumed that employees belong to a heterosexual family structure (one man and one woman). Our goal was to determine whether previous research on employees’ experiences of work-family conflict applied similarly to LGB employees and their families.

We found that, although LGB employees experience many of the same work-family conflicts that their heterosexual colleagues do — for example, work time interfering with family time, or feeling unable to separate from work at home — they experience a range of additional conflicts related to their stigmatized family identity. These include a sense of tension over whether to take advantage of family-related benefits for fear of revealing their same-sex relationship, feeling conflicted over whether to bring spouses to work events, and feeling uneasy about discussing with a supervisor the family-related challenges that impact their work life.

We also wanted to know what was causing these unique experiences of work-family conflict, and how employees in our sample coped with them. In particular, we learned that when work environments signaled to employees that their family “type” was less accepted, compared with more traditional families, they were more likely to experience stigma-based work-family conflict. Participants reported that the lack an explicit invitation for “partners” instead of “spouses” to family-related work events, or the absence of a comprehensive benefits package for same-sex partners, often led to perceptions that their family was unwelcome or less accepted in their workplace. Similarly, hearing coworkers discuss issues of “family” in a very traditional way, without considering that families might not all take the same form, led participants to report a sense of uneasiness over how receptive their coworkers and supervisors would be to their specific work-family challenges.

August 23, 2018, by Katina Sawyer and Christian Thoroughgood, Harvard business review

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The post How Companies Make It Harder for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Employees to Achieve Work-Life Balance appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Tom Daley on becoming a dad and why UK surrogacy laws need to change

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Tom Daley

Tom Daley is sitting on a sofa in a central London hotel suite with his husband, Dustin Lance Black, while their seven-week-old baby, Robbie Ray, snoozes peacefully beside them – and it’s clear the new fathers (both dressed in baby blue) are entirely besotted with their son.

“We don’t ever turn on a TV anymore, we just stare at the little one,” Tom Daley, 24, tells The Independent. “It’s been so crazy. It feels kind of surreal still, the fact that we have a…”

He stops mid-sentence to coo at baby Robbie, which I soon realise is to become a regular occurrence during our interview.surrogate lawyers, surrogate lawyer, surrogate attorney, legal surrogate, surrogate legal

“But he’s brought so much love and joy to the family,” Daley continues.

Born to a surrogate in June, Robbie is apparently a very well-behaved newborn. “He’s a great baby,” says Black, 44. “I think we got a starter baby, I think we got the best baby on the planet.”

“But we might be biased,” adds Daley.

The Olympic diver and his Oscar-winning screenwriter husband met in 2013, married in 2017 and revealed they were going to be fathers in 2018 – an announcement which wasn’t met entirely positively by the public.

“I think that’s why we want to help educate people because I think a lot of them were under the impression that the baby was going to be ripped from his mother’s arms,” says Daley. “People will have their opinions and that’s fine. All we want is what’s best for the little one.”

The couple had their son through surrogacy but admit they didn’t know a great deal about the options open to them as a same-sex couple beforehand. “It was an education, we had to learn,” says Black. 

By Rachel Hosie, theindependent.co.uk, August 22, 2018

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The post Tom Daley on becoming a dad and why UK surrogacy laws need to change appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Italy’s deputy prime minister calls gay parents ‘unnatural’ and surrogacy ‘a horror’

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The Italian deputy prime minister has called same-sex parents ‘unnatural’ and vowed to keep all families heterosexual.

Matteo Salvini, the far-right leader of the Northern League party, has risen to popularity on the back of rhetoric against migrants, Islam and the European Union.

Soon after becoming deputy prime minister in June alongside Five Star Movement leader Luigi di Maio, the two nationalist politicians tried to appoint anti-LGBT+ journalist Marcello Foa as the head of public broadcaster Rai.

In an interview with Catholic news outlet La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, Salvini expressed his strong opposition to same-sex parents, equal marriage and surrogacy.

The 45-year-old populist figurehead, who is also the country’s interior minister, was asked about same-sex marriage, to which he responded: “My position is firmly against.”

by Josh Jackman, pinknews.co.uk, August 13, 2018

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Source: Time for Families

More People Now Support Allowing Businesses To Refuse LGBTQ Customers: Survey

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Americans are conflicted over whether Christians like Colorado baker Jack Phillips should have the right to refuse service to queer customers.

In handing a narrow victory to a Christian baker who refused to make cakes for a gay wedding, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to punt a bigger question down the road: whether Americans can use religion to justify discrimination against LGBTQ people.

A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that for many Americans, the jury is also still out on this issue.

PRRI completed the survey shortly after the Supreme Court’s June decision on Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. It found that Americans were conflicted over whether Christians with conservative religious beliefs, like Colorado baker Jack Phillips, should have the right to refuse service to queer customers.

The survey of 2,008 adults between June 27 and July 8, 2018, showed evidence of an America still divided over how to treat LGBTQ citizens.

Nearly half of Americans surveyed (46 percent) said that owners of wedding-based businesses, such as caterers, florists and bakers, should be allowed to refuse to serve same-sex couples if doing so violates their religious beliefs. Roughly the same number (48 percent) disagreed, saying that these types of businesses should be required to serve queer couples.   

That’s a slight shift from how Americans felt about the issue last year, PRRI reports. In 2017, only 41 percent of Americans said wedding-based businesses should be allowed to refuse service to LGBTQ people, while a majority of Americans (53 percent) said these businesses should be required to serve gay and lesbian couples.

The post More People Now Support Allowing Businesses To Refuse LGBTQ Customers: Survey appeared first on Time For Families.


Source: Time for Families

Sperm donor secrets emerge as Australia law erases anonymity

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For Peter Peacock, fate arrived in the form of a registered letter.

The letter, at least initially, looked to be a bit of a letdown. Peacock had gone to the post office expecting the delivery of a big, furry aviator jacket he’d ordered online. And so it was with little fanfare that the Australian grandfather and retired cop tore the envelope open as he walked back to his car — at which point he stopped dead in his tracks.

“Dear Mr Peacock,” the letter began. “The Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA) has received an enquiry of a personal nature which may or may not relate to you. The matter concerns a record held in relation to a project you may have assisted with at Prince Henry’s Institute.”

Prince Henry’s? The Melbourne clinic where he’d donated sperm nearly 40 years ago?

There could be only one reason for such a letter, he thought. Someone out there had come to life through his donation.

His mind raced. How on earth was he going to tell everyone? How would he break it to his two grown daughters? And how could this person even know who he was? He had been promised that his donation would be anonymous.

And for decades it was, until a new law in one Australian state retroactively erased the anonymity of sperm and egg donors. Their offspring now have the legal right to know who they are.

Which is why a week after receiving that letter, Peacock found himself staring at a photograph of a woman named Gypsy Diamond, whose face looked so much like his own that he felt an instant and overwhelming connection. He gazed in wonder at her dark, almond-shaped eyes. His eyes.

“God almighty, I looked at it and I thought — ‘Bloody hell. I can’t deny that girl,’” he says. “She was my child from the start.”

By KRISTEN GELINEAU AP.com, August 2, 2018

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Source: Time for Families

Sudbury court awards woman ownership of embryo called ‘property’ in precedent-setting case

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Woman, 48, was divorced from man and awarded embryo based on fertility clinic consent form.

A court in Sudbury, Ont., has awarded an embryo to a woman in a case involving her ex-husband, in what is being called a precedent-setting decision because the embryo has no biological connection to the couple.embryo

Two childhood friends decided to get married in 2009 to have and raise children together, but the man didn’t want his sperm used and the woman’s eggs weren’t suitable. So three years later, they purchased eggs and sperm from a business in the United States for $11,500 US, and two good embryos were created through in-vitro fertilization. 

In December 2012, the woman gave birth to a son. Eight days later, the marriage dissolved and both sides claimed ownership of the second embryo in the divorce.

The judge’s decision awarding the embryo to the woman, who is now 48, was released last week.

It hinged on a consent form from a fertility clinic in southern Ontario on which the couple indicated the “patient’s wishes” would be honoured in case of divorce. The form describes the woman receiving the embryo as “the patient.”

Erik White · CBC News · Aug 01, 2018

Click here to read the entire article.

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Source: Time for Families