Kai Wright: (Traditional) Fathers Don't Always Know Best

Today's post is from Kai Wright, author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Wright is is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY, whose work explores the politics of sex, race, and health. He contributes to several publications, ranging from The Nation to ColorLines magazine. This post originally appeared on TheRoot.com, where he is senior writer.

Who's your daddy? Barack Obama, that's who. We haven't seen black family role modeling like this since the Huxtables. Actually, Cliff and Clair couldn't touch the Obamas-- they didn't have Bo. Still, the president's not content with his own nuclear family bliss. He really, really wants you to have a great dad, too.

But the problem with Obama's effort to turn Father's Day into an annual conversation about the tragedy of failed fathers is that it's rooted in one of the greatest-- and most consequential-- lies the Christian right has sold the country: That “traditional” family structures are best equipped to produce healthy kids. The notion that biological fathers are essential to childhood development wasn't true when Dan Quayle asserted it in 1992, and it won't become true no matter how eloquently Barack Obama restates it.

“The hole a man leaves when he abandons his responsibility to his children is one that no government can fill,” Obama wrote in a beautifully crafted Parade magazine essay last week. “We can do everything possible to provide good jobs and good schools and safe streets for our kids, but it will never be enough to fully make up the difference.”

This is a terribly moving refrain that echoes through all of the president's rhetoric on fathers-- and it's entirely beside the point. Nobody sane would argue that government can give a child love. That truism, however, does not mean only a gendered dyad of parents are adequately equipped to do so.

Video: The Daddy Shift on KGO-TV San Francisco

Click here if you can't see the video: http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/video?id=6879634.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Father’s Day Recommended Reading

Today's post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting are Transforming the American Family. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic.

It's an empirical fact that fathers are comparatively rare in children's books — when economist David A. Anderson and psychologist Mykol Hamilton studied 200 children's books in 2005, they found that fathers appeared about half as often as mothers. Mothers were ten times more likely to be depicted taking care of babies than fathers and twice as likely to be seen nurturing older children.

No surprise there, of course. Moms are still the ones most likely to be taking care of kids. But where does that leave families who don't fit the traditional mold? And how does that help parents who want to provide caring role models to their sons?

There are books out there, few and far between, that depict dads as co-parents and primary caregivers. In an effort to find them, I consulted bookstores in San Francisco as well as my local children's librarian.

My list is not exhaustive; these are only the ones I can recommend, and there are many titles I found online that I wasn't able to read in real life. And because these kinds of books are so rare, I'm willing to bet that there are plenty out there that few people know about.

Nancy Polikoff: Israel, Civil Marriage, and Valuing All Families

Today's post is from Nancy Polikoff, author of Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage: Valuing All Families under the Law. Polikoff is a Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, where she teaches Sexuality and the Law and has taught Family Law for more than 20 years. This post originally appeared at her Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage blog.

Earlier this week, Tel Aviv University was the site of the 9th annual queer studies conference An Other Sex. I was honored to deliver a keynote on my book, Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage.

Israel has a distinctive legal regime within which to consider same-sex relationships. There is no civil marriage in Israel, only religious marriage. This keeps many straight couples from marrying because, for example, a Jew cannot marry a non-Jew. So there has been pressure for years for different-sex couples to not make marriage the dividing line between relationships that count and those that don't.

Israel recognizes the legal status of those "known in public" as spouses. It also allows couples to register foreign marriages (they say Cyprus does a thriving business marrying different-sex couples who can't marry in Israel). Because of this (after much litigation), Israel will register the marriages of same-sex couples who marry elsewhere and will recognize same-sex unmarried couples in ways that are similar to those accorded unmarried different-sex couples.

There is a push for civil marriage here -- but it would be for different-sex couples only. So this is not a good thing for lesbian and gay families.

Carole Joffe: The Legacy of George Tiller

Today's blog post is from Carole Joffe, author of Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us (Beacon Press, forthcoming January 2010) and Doctors of Conscience: the Struggle to provide Abortion before and after Roe v Wade (Beacon Press, 1996) and professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis.

"It comes down to who is the patient. Is the woman the patient, or is the fetus the patient? One or other is the patient. I've never heard a fetus talk to me. I've heard thousands and thousands of women share their pain, their desperation, and their hopelessness." These words were spoken to me some twenty years ago by Dr. George Tiller, as I was researching a book on abortion providers' experiences before and after Roe v Wade. Tiller, who was brutally assassinated in his church on May 31, was one of the most compassionate-- and feminist-- individuals I have ever encountered. "Trust women" was his well-known motto, prominently displayed at his clinic in Wichita, Kansas.

He was asked repeatedly by friends how he could continue his work in the face of the unending violence and legal harassment that he endured in the years leading up to his murder: his home and office were frequently blockaded (I recall hearing that he and his wife had to be helicoptered out of their house to attend a child's wedding, as antiabortion fanatics were surrounding his home); he was shot in both arms in 1993; and he was subjected to numerous lawsuits brought by a grandstanding anti-abortion Attorney General in Kansas and by Operation Rescue operatives, all of which he ultimately won, but which took a huge toll, financially and emotionally. His answer was always the same: "Where else can these women go?"

Tiller's answer was not a rhetorical one. He was one of the very few physicians in the United States who provided abortion care well into the third trimester of pregnancy. It is this fact that made him so reviled in antiabortion circles, and unquestionably the most controversial abortion provider in the country. Operation Rescue relocated their offices to Wichita a few years ago, with the specific intent of closing him down. Each day, the women who came to him from all over the U.S., and from abroad as well, had to go through a gauntlet of protestors holding grotesque posters and screaming about "Tiller the baby killer."

It is hardly surprising that antiabortion zealots would find Dr. Tiller such a convenient target, focusing on his late term procedures. What has been more surprising, and disappointing, to me has been the inadequate coverage of Tiller's work in most of the mainstream media in the days since his murder. I myself have spoken to a fair number of reporters, have read numerous stories from papers across the country, and consumed a great deal of television and radio reporting on this event. I have been struck that although all reporters mention that he offered late term abortions, as a way of explaining his notoriety in antiabortion circles, remarkably few of these print or radio and television journalists explained why Tiller did this, and who actually were the recipients of these procedures. The fact that so many of those reporting on Tiller were so oblivious of the circumstances of his patients is in itself a powerful indication of the marginality of both abortion providers and patients in American culture.

Carlos A. Ball: The Silver Lining in the California Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Ruling Upholding Proposition 8

Today's post is from Carlos A. Ball, Professor of Law at the Rutgers University School of Law (Newark). He has written extensively on gay rights issues and is the author of The Morality of Gay Rights: An Exploration in Political Philosophy. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.

Now that it has been a week since the California Supreme Court's decision upholding Proposition 8, it is a good time to take stock of what is happening with same-sex marriage not only in California, but also in other parts of the country. For those of us who support LGBT rights, the California court's decision was disappointing and frustrating. But in the long run, I think that the LGBT rights movement will benefit politically as a result of the court's ruling.

I say this because if the court had struck down Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, that would have created a political firestorm in California and elsewhere. Although there is a solid legal argument to be made that Proposition 8 should have been struck down because it was inconsistent with core principles contained in the state constitution, the politics behind the case are more complicated. If the court had sided with the plaintiffs, many would have seen the ruling as an affront to basic democratic values. The court, after all, would have overturned the expressed preference of a majority of Californians who voted in the November election.

There can be no doubt that if the court had struck down the Amendment, conservative political activists would have used the ruling to fire up their supporters by attacking the court for its supposed activism and lack of accountability. That kind of anti-judicial rhetoric has unfortunately proven quite effective in convincing voters in more than half the states to approve constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage.

Sophia Raday: Art Lesson: A Child's Drawing of the War in Iraq

Sophia Raday lives in Berkeley, California, with her soldier/police officer husband, their two children, a bipartisan dog, and assorted firearms. She is the author of Love in Condition Yellow: A Memoir of an Unlikely Marriage, which chronicles her peacenik/warrior love story and provides insight on age-old political divisions in the United States.. This post originally appeared at Sophia Raday's Love in Condition Yellow blog.

A while ago, my seven-year-old son's feelings were hurt at school when a teacher criticized one of his drawings. She looked at my son's drawing of his father and said, "Does my torso look like that?" The drawing was an in-class assignment to illustrate a homework project called "the personal timeline." For every year of my son's life, he wrote one sentence describing something important that happened.

My son's drawing is on a small white paper, about two inches square. Back in January, when he first showed it to me, he unfolded it from a tiny tight little bundle, as if he had tried to make it as small as possible. After I'd reassured him I thought it was a very good drawing, I asked if I could keep it. When he agreed, I tucked it among my credit cards.

A week or so ago, I pulled it from my purse to show a friend who directs an arts education program, while telling her the story of his teacher's reaction. She shook her head, murmuring, "but art is about creating meaning. . . " She looked at the drawing intently, noting the simple figure, the flower-like hands, the black shoes, a long neck, a round head. A sun in the corner had been erased and then enlarged to take up about a quarter of the paper. "Did you ask him what it is?" My friend inquired.

"It's his father." I said.

"But what does it mean?" she said. "Look, the clothes are colored green. Do you think it's a military uniform?"

I leaned over to look at the drawing with her, an uneasy feeling growing within me. It had been weeks since my son came home, eyes downcast, and handed me this picture, asking, "Do you think this is any good?" Weeks since we lay together at bedtime and talked about his feelings of anxiety in his classroom.

Why had I never thought to ask him what the picture meant?

Karen Kahn: Five by Five and Counting

Today's post is from Karen Kahn, the co-author, with her spouse Pat Gozemba, of Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America's First Legal Same-Sex Marriages.

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, New England feels like a roller coaster hurtling toward equality. On April 6, two more states-- Maine and New Hampshire-- passed marriage equality legislation. The Maine bill has been signed into law by Governor Baldacci; New Hampshire awaits the governor's signature. In addition, this year Connecticut and Vermont joined Massachusetts in recognizing same-sex marriage. Thus, at the five-year anniversary of marriage equality, five New England states have at the very least expressed strong support for a vision of inclusiveness. In addition, Iowa-- smack in the heartland-- allows same-sex couples to marry.

Will we have all five New England states with marriage equality on May 17? No, not yet. New Hampshire's Governor Lynch may yet veto the bill, though there is a strong chance that he will let the bill become law without his signature. In Maine, we face a dreaded referendum. Twice the voters of Maine turned back a gay civil rights law. Those opposed to the same-sex marriage law now have 90 days to collect signatures to put it before the voters. They may fail, as they did at their third attempt to overturn the gay civil rights law. But we can't count on it. When same-sex marriage goes to the ballot it is tough to win, as we saw in California last November.

Admittedly California didn't have New England's secret weapon-- GLAD. GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders) set out last year to bring marriage equality to the six New England states in a campaign called "6 x '12"-- six New England states by 2012. Let's face it: they are way ahead of schedule. And I don't doubt that they have a plan for securing our rights in Maine.

The galloping pace of progress in New England, however, isn't matched by the rest of the country. I got to see this firsthand this winter when I made my annual move from cold New England to tropical Hawaii. Hawaii jumpstarted the marriage equality movement in 1993, when its Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to exclude same-sex couples from civil marriage. Unfortunately, that ruling was followed by the passage of a state constitutional amendment giving the legislature the right to define marriage as the union of opposite-sex couples. In 1998, Hawaii passed a reciprocal beneficiaries law that gives any two unmarried adults, including same-sex couples, a few limited rights primarily associated with joint property ownership.

Amy Seidl: Mother’s Day Flowers: A Sign of Our Changing Ecology?

Today's post is from Amy Seidl, author of Early Spring: An Ecologist and Her Children Wake to a Warming World. Seidl has taught in the environmental studies programs at Middlebury College and the University of Vermont. She is currently a research scholar at Middlebury and associate director of the LivingFuture Foundation. She lives with her family in Huntington, Vermont, in a solar- and wind-powered home.

The celebration of Mother's Day isn't complete without flowers, bouquets of tulips and roses, clusters of violets and daffodils gripped in the fists of small children. Flowers capture the season, that time when we are relieved from winter and move decidedly into spring. Flowering azalea bushes, ephemeral wildflowers, and cultivated garden blossoms all confirm that the growing season is truly here.

Except that all this is changing. As the planet warms and weather conditions change, flowering plants are responding. Lilacs, perhaps the floral archetype of the feminine, are blooming up to two weeks earlier than in the 1960s. Native plants like phlox, columbine, and milkweed flower earlier in the Wisconsin woods where Aldo Leopold first recorded their timing, a pattern that others are seeing across America's natural landscapes. Fruit trees are responding too and in January 2007 apple trees bloomed in Boston's Public Garden after a record-breaking warm December.

What does this mean for Mother's Day? What is the connection? First, because the celebration is strongly tied to season we have the opportunity to see the signs of this phenomenon in our everyday, local landscapes. We just need to take a look. Second, climate change is altering everything about life; ecosystems are entering flux as species respond to changing conditions, the risk of extinction has grown immeasurably, and humans and their built environments are threatened by extreme events they are not prepared for. Who better to demand that we stop global warming than the mothers, the givers and protectors of life? Who better to promote a future founded on clean energy, clean water, and healthy ecosystems? Who better to illuminate that not only the Arctic but our backyards are changing? Who better to say it with flowers?    

Mark Hyman: Little League at Seventy

Today's post is from Mark Hyman, author of Until It Hurts: America's Obsession with Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids. Hyman is a sports writer for BusinessWeek and numerous other publications.

Little League Baseball is marking its 70^th anniversary this year with a spring- and summer-long series of celebrations, parties and assorted other nods to the past. One occurred last week.

The press release posted on the Little League Baseball Web site read: "In the lobby of the Peter J. McGovern Little League Museum, Little League International continued its year-long celebration of the program's 70th anniversary with Thomas 'Tuck' Frazier, a player during Little League's first season in 1939, selecting the first winning names in the annual Little League Baseball World Series ticket lottery."

Congratulations to the winners, Michelle Rhodes of Jersey Shore, Pa., and Mark Mangan from Larksville, Pa., each of whom will receive four tickets to the Little League Baseball World Series World Championship Game in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in August, as well as World Series caps, T-shirts, trading pins, souvenir programs and gratis admission to the Little League Baseball museum.

What interested me most was the reference to Tuck Frazier, one of the first Little Leaguers. In my reporting for Until It Hurts: America's Obsession With Youth Sports and How It Harms Our Kids, I spent a couple of hours quizzing, but mostly listening to, two other original Little Leaguers. Neither interview made it into the book, unfortunately. But meeting the Little League pioneers remains one of the highlights of the project.

Jeremy Adam Smith: Same-Sex Marriage in Iowa and Vermont

Today's post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The Daddy Shift, forthcoming from Beacon Press in spring 2009. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic.

On April 3, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that the state's same-sex marriage ban violates the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. Just four days later, Vermont's legislature voted to legalize same-sex marriages.

Predictably, opponents have been predicting that the sky will fall. Chuck Hurley of the Iowa Family Policy Center, for example, claims that heterosexual marriage is the "seabed and cradle of civilization," and that same-sex marriage "is a battle of good versus evil, truth versus lies."

I'm not gay. I am a married, heterosexual father. I am also raising a child on the border between Noe Valley, a notoriously child-friendly enclave in San Francisco, and the Castro, one of the world's gayest neighborhoods. In San Francisco, one doesn't have to imagine a dystopian time when homosexuality is an integral part of American life. In my neighborhood especially, that particular "apocalypse" is now, and it apparently involves a great deal of diaper changing. Gay and lesbian families are a daily reality in the place where I live-- in particular, they are very much a part of my family's daily life, my son's life.

I expect Iowans and Vermonters-- along with residents of Maine and New Hampshire and, indeed, everyone in America-- might be interested in hearing how it's going, since those states are about to join Connecticut and Massachusetts in becoming popular destinations for same-sex weddings. Have the gay and lesbian couples around us undermined my marriage or threatened my son in some way? In neighborhoods like ours, have the Christian Right's apocalyptic predictions of social collapse come to pass?

The Three 'P's: An Education System Where Play is its Own Reward

Today's post is from Chris Mercogliano author of In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness. Mercogliano has been a teacher at the Albany Free School since 1973 and co-director since 1985.

It was heartening to see the New York Times tout the importance of play in school settings. But how sad that the excommunication of play from American culture has reduced the discussion of its value to the question of whether five percent of the school day should be sacrificed to recess; or God forbid, should it be ten?

Let me lay my bias out straight. For thirty-seven years I have been involved with an independent school for students ages 2-14 in which students spend the overwhelming majority of their time playing. And by this I don't mean learning games or organized sports, although they sometimes participate in them too. What I'm talking about here is play as defined by Jean Piaget: "actions that are an end in themselves and do not form part of any series of actions imposed by someone else or from outside." Real play, in other words, is its own reward. It involves imagination, improvisation, and quite often the natural world. It's when kids engage in making-believe, horsing around, and inventing their own games. It's when they paint, or draw, or sing, or dance, or write a poem or story, not in order to fulfill an English or art assignment, but to answer the call of the Muse.

A great many observers consider our approach, which I once teasingly described to a dubious Alfie Kohn as the "summer camp" model of education, to be romantic or naive, if not downright irresponsible or crazy. A dose of play here and there is fine, certainly. As the Times article noted, kids' brains need a rest once in a while. Their bodies also need exercise, and everyone recognizes the vital role of play in social development. But at the end of the day, learning is serious business and a lot of hard work.

Or is it? Let's examine the evidence for a moment, which increasingly confirms the fundamental contributions play makes to every aspect of a child's growth.

Here, There, and Everywhere: Preventing Lead Poisoning Requires Strong Regulation

Today's post is from Lydia Denworth, author of Toxic Truth: A Scientist, a Doctor, and the Battle over Lead. Denworth is a former Newsweek reporter and People bureau chief. Her writing on science, education, and other social issues has appeared in the New York Times, Redbook, Health, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three sons.

Back in August of 2007, I was trying to work on vacation. I was squirreled away in a back bedroom surrounded by files and books when I got a Google alert. Millions of toys were being recalled because of dangerously high levels of leads.

It was a bittersweet moment. When I started work on a book about the battle over lead, I heard a lot about how lead was a problem of the past. That, of course, was part of the point: the book was about what it took to be able to say exactly that. But I often said that lead has a way of coming back to haunt us.

Looking at the email, I wanted to throw open the screen door and shout: I told you so! At the same time, who wants to be right about such a thing? If only it were a problem of the past. For one thing, I wouldn't have to now run to the toy bin and extract every Thomas the Tank Engine.

Furthermore, I was literally surrounded by the history of the battle over lead. Within arm's reach was a book that mentioned the first federal pamphlet warning parents about the dangers of lead in toys--in the 1930s. Another book described a study that found that 25% of Mattel toys had dangerously high levels of lead--in 1957.

Have we learned nothing? I thought bitterly.

Why Are All the Hapa Kids Sitting Together?

Today's post is from Jeremy Adam Smith, senior editor of Greater Good magazine and author of The Daddy Shift, forthcoming from Beacon Press in spring 2009. He blogs about the politics of parenting at Daddy Dialectic, where this post, in a slightly different form, originally appeared.

Three weeks ago I went to pick up my son, Liko, from preschool and found his class gathered outside the school, waiting for the mommies and daddies.

Something struck me: The white girls huddled in one group and the white boys in another.

Where was Liko? He and his three other part-white/part-Asian classmates, boys and girls, were off to one side, hanging out with each other. (A note on demographics: Since this is a Jewish Community Center preschool, a majority of the kids, including the half-Asian ones, have at least one Jewish parent; there are no black or Latino kids in his class. I should also note here that the white/Asian mix is very, very, very common in San Francisco, as it is in Hawaii, where my wife grew up.)

Now, my perception has to be taken with a grain of salt. When it comes to sources of social tension like race, adults see what they're prone to see, and I'm no exception.

Home for the Holidays?

Today's post is from Jacqueline Olds, MD, and Richard S. Schwartz, MD, authors of The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century. Drs. Olds and Schwartz are both psychoanalysts and Associate Clinical Professors of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Olds teaches child psychiatry and Dr. Schwartz teaches adult psychiatry at the McLean and Massachusetts General Hospitals. Married to each other and with two grown children, they each maintain a private practice in Cambridge, MA. They have written two other books, Overcoming Loneliness in Everyday Life and Marriage in Motion.

On the front page of the Boston Globe, just beneath the story on surging unemployment, is another headline. "Guess who's not coming to dinner? Amid slump, holiday travel plans stall." The economic crisis threatens to disrupt one of the few moments when we, as Americans, regularly remember that electronic connections can't replace a family meal. Thanksgiving has been the time to emerge from our wired (and wireless) solitude to move real bodies through physical space, over clogged highways and through packed airports to be at the table with our families for the holiday. But even before the economic crisis, it was already tempting not to go.

These days, we can do so much from home – our work, our shopping, our socializing, our game-playing. It's not only convenient; it's also high status. It shows that we have access to all the latest technologies of connection. It shows we are freer than neighbors who are still tied to commutes and schedules. Busyness itself has become high status, an upwardly mobile contest to see who can keep more balls in the air. With so much to do, who has time to run to the store? Or to pack up for the holidays?

Obamanomics for the Missing Class

Today's post is from Victor Tan Chen, co-author (with Katherine S. Newman) of The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America and the founding editor and president of INTHEFRAY Magazine. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Newsday and the Minority Law Journal, and in the book Chutes and Ladders. He is a Harvard doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy.

Now that Barack Obama has won the presidency, and the Democrats have broadened their majorities in Congress, the picture looks a little less bleak for the country's poor and near poor families.

In policies ranging from taxes to health care, from housing to job creation, Obamanomics will likely provide some welcome relief from the status quo of the last eight years, during which the ranks of low-income households grew. In 2000, 29.2 percent of the population, or 81 million Americans, lived on household incomes of less than twice the poverty line. In 2007, 30.5 percent of the country, or 91 million Americans, fell into this bottom category of poor and near poor households.

In our book The Missing Class, Katherine Newman and I looked at the situation of near poor families at the end of last decade and the beginning of this decade. Rates of poverty and near poverty were steadily falling from their peaks in the early 1990s. Americas economy was roaring. But as we described in our book, even in those boom years near poor families were struggling mightily to find quality health care, housing, and education for their children.

Now that another downturn is upon us, the economic fortunes of the less well-off look far worse. And having just approved a massive infusion of government money to prop up the country's floundering banks, the federal government — even with a progressive president at the helm — will find its options even more limited than is usually the case during recession times, as half-a-trillion-dollar budget deficits feed interest rate rises and worsen the market malaise.

Do You Know Your Genes?

Today's post is from Clare Dunsford, author of Spelling Love with an X: A Mother, A Son, and the Gene that Binds Them. Dunsford is an associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College and has been a contributing writer for Boston College Magazine. She was previously an adjunct lecturer in English at Boston College and Harvard University.

Maybe you have heard of the HGP, the Human Genome Project. But have you heard about the PGP-10? This daring group of ten genetic pioneers has agreed to post their personal genomes on the Web in an effort to create a database of information that may lead to faster cures for genetic diseases. Very few of us have anything but the vaguest and most anecdotal information about the genes we carry: "I've got Aunt Hilda's hips and Uncle Frank's short temper." Certainly my family and I were not aware of our own genetic inheritance before my son's diagnosis with fragile X syndrome in 1993; the FMR1 gene wasn't even discovered until two years before. Fragile X is the most common inherited cause of mental impairment and the most common known cause of autism.

When I sat in front of a genetic counselor a couple of years after the initial diagnosis, I saw my family arrayed before me like a poorly designed Tinkertoy—a bunch of squares and circles connected by lines. The genetic counselor informed me that every person carries six to eight genes that are problematic. I just happened to know the name of one of mine. FMR1 this little creature is called. When a section of nucleotides called CGG repeats too many times, a vital protein is not produced, leading to cognitive disability, emotional difficulties and attention deficit.

In the fifteen years since my family learned of fragile X, the full human genome has been sequenced, much more quickly than anyone predicted, and genetic tests have been developed for over 1500 conditions. Some day (if you don't already) you will know the name of one of your own genes, one of the half dozen that carry the potential to make you ill or change your personality or cause you to bear a child who will never be independent.

A Graphic Book Adaptation of Geoffrey Canada’s Fist Stick Knife Gun

Today's post is from Jamar Nicholas, a Philadelphia-based cartoonist, illustrator and educator. He is currently working on a graphic adaptation of Geoffrey Canada's bestselling memoir, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence in America, a book in which "Canada describes the rituals and codes of violence that governed life for children like him, growing up in the inner city in the 50's and 60's." Nicholas has created several popular comics, most notably web-comic Detective Boogaloo: Hip Hop Cop, and he teaches at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I was born in Philadelphia, PA, in the early 1970s. It's hard to find a picture of me as a youth where I'm smiling.

That's not entirely true. I did smile when necessary - I worked up what we called a "Kool-Aid" smile whenever I had been ordered to do so for the camera. I didn't really smile under my own recognizance. The reason being was that I hated childhood.

You'd think that what should follow is some hard-scrabble story of an anguished upbringing in a troubled home, but it didn't exactly go down like that. Most of my painful memories came from leaving the house every day to go out into the world—to school or, maybe, down the block to the corner store/bodega/mom & pop to get the Sunday paper, walking home, on the bus—just being outside was the worst thing in the world when I was a kid.

Wait, though—kids LOVE going outside, right? Yes, but… that's where the other kids are. The ones from "around the corner" who you hoped weren't there to harass you when you walked home. The kids on your block who demanded you prove yourself. You couldn't be a "punk" or "soft" in front of these kids. These were the kids you had to fight for your bicycle every month, or fight to keep that brand new Philadelphia '76ers jacket you got for your birthday. I hated the fact that every time I left the house, the real threat of violence in some manner was always just a crooked glance away at all times.

On Gay Marriage and Family Issues, A Change is Gonna Come

Today's post is from Karen Kahn and Patricia A. Gozemba, co-authors, with Marilyn Humphries, of Courting Equality: A Documentary History of America's First Legal Same-Sex Marriages. The former editor of Sojourner: The Women's Forum, Karen Kahn also edited Frontline Feminism: Essays from Sojourner's First Twenty Years. A former professor of English and Women's Studies, Patricia A. Gozemba is the coauthor of Pockets of Hope: How Students and Teachers Change the World. Kahn and Gozemba were married in September 2005. Watch their new video at www.youtube.com/courtingequality.

Last week, America voted for hope, not fear. For peace, not war. For love, not hatred. The election of Barack Obama represents what is best in the American spirit---fairness, equality, respect for hardworking people, a belief in a better tomorrow. It has been a long time coming. As Obama has said again and again over the last 21 months, America is a nation defined by its continued desire to form "a more perfect union."

Unfortunately, for the LGBT community, voters who went to the polls in record numbers on Tuesday, voted their fears on the issues that matter to us most—respect for our families. We lost votes on marriage equality in three states: California, Florida and Arizona. And in Arkansas, voters banned unmarried couples from serving as foster or adoptive parents. This measure, clearly aimed at gay families, is perhaps the most damaging of this year's initiatives in that it so blatantly carries the message that gay people are harmful to children.

If history provides any lessons, Arkansas and the nation can be heartened by the Massachusetts story. In 1986, when a similar policy was introduced in Massachusetts, it galvanized the LGBT community. In our book Courting Equality, we tell the story of how the Massachusetts foster care controversy set our community on the path toward full equality—culminating in Massachusetts becoming the first state in the country to legalize same-sex marriage. Arkansas homophobes beware!

In The Exam Room: Unexpected Pregnancies and Hard Choices

Today's post is from Patricia Harman, author of The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir. Harman got her start as a lay-midwife on the rural communes where she lived in the '60s and '70s, going on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons. In the interest of privacy, the names and some identifying details of the women she discusses in this post have been changed.

I am standing in the exam room, in the Women's Health Center, listening to the rapid heartbeat of a four-month-old fetus on a Doppler. The patient, Carey McDonald, 17, a slim blond cheerleader, is alone today. Sometimes her mother, a single waitress, comes with her. The father of the baby, a star football player on the hometown team, denies paternity. "But it's his!" Carey told me. "It is! He's the only boy I've ever been with and even that was only two times." Carey and her mom will raise this baby together.

I don't ask the young woman if she thought of using a condom. I don't ask her if she had access to a birth control clinic. I don't ask if her mother ever talked to her about sex or if she had sex education classes at school. It's too late for that now.

Natalie Lopez is a 29-year-old travel agent. She's seven weeks pregnant and accompanied, at this first exam, by her lover of three years. "I can't take birth control pills because of the other medications I'm on, but we used protection every time." Her eyes water over and she hands me a folded white paper on which are printed the names of two antidepressants and a mood stabilizer. "We want to be parents. I've always wanted a baby. But I can't have this one. The medications I'm on are toxic and there's a high chance the child will be born with a congenital defect."

If Natalie had come to me sooner, to get a more effective method of birth control, this might not have happened. But Natalie doesn't have health insurance. There are over 17 million women in the United States that don't have health insurance.