Right Voices

It’s all in the adjectives as Tim Graham point out!  The WaPo featured April Witt’s story, which focused on two women who entered into a civil union in Vermont, and are now battling for custody of an artificially inseminated daughter. Vermont says Janet the lesbian partner is automatically a parent, Virginia says not so fast. 

The story contained several elements that the gay left does not appreciate — Lisa the birth mother left behind homosexuality and embraced Christianity, and the story mentions ex-gay authors and ministries. But it also carried the classic tendency to divide the ideological combat between “conservatives” and not liberals, but “gay rights activists,” activists whose work is in historic “landmark” cases.

This particular passage caught my eye:

Nevertheless, the women eventually decided to formalize their union. As symbols of their commitment, they exchanged homemade art projects: Each woman traced her hands and drew hearts in the center of each palm, Janet recalled. They executed wills, powers of attorney and health-care surrogacy documents formalizing, as best they could under Virginia law, their commitment. “We knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together,” Janet said. “We knew that we wanted to have children. Early on, I knew it was going to be challenging in Virginia.”

THE WOMEN INTERTWINED LIVES AT A TIME when options for gays and lesbians trying to form legally recognized families were expanding. In Vermont, a new law recognizing civil unions between same-sex couples went into effect on July 1, 2000.

On December 19 of that year, Lisa and Janet took a brief vacation to Stowe, Vt., to enter into a civil union there, even though their home state of Virginia would not recognize it.

No matter how the author tries to spin this into an arguement against the religious right, it is a matter of law.