More traditional press about same-gender marriage

More and more stories are appearing in newspapers and mainstream internet news sources. Rather than sensationalizing the stories or taking conservative, liberal or biased stands, the stories are generally of human interest and bring real people with real lives into our living rooms. This, I feel, is a very good thing. The more people know others who are not like them, or feel as if they know them, the more accepting people tend to be.

Just as Massachusetts has not experienced an increase in marriage breakups, gay children or the breakdown of society generally, neither will the other states which have passed laws or whose state supreme courts have ordered the allowance of same-gender marriages. Iowa is yet another case in point. The sky has not fallen, although to hear the opposition it is on its way towards earth as we speak.

The following story (excerpted) is about specific people and tells their stories and those of the opponents fairly (even though I could do without the latter). In this case the very children who were supposed to be traumatized and stunted because of having same-gender parents speak about their lives and wishes for their parents.

‘GAYBE BOOM”: CHILDREN OF GAY COUPLES SPEAK OUT.

CNN — Jesse Levey is a Republican activist who says he believes in family values, small government and his lesbian mothers’ right to marry.

Levey is part of the “gayby boom” generation. The 29-year-old management consultant is the son of a lesbian couple who chose to have a child through artificial insemination. He’s their only child.

Critics of same-sex marriage say people such as Levey will grow up shunned and sexually confused. Yet he says he’s a “well-adjusted heterosexual” whose upbringing proves that love, not gender, makes a family.

“You can imagine what my parents thought when I was 13 and listening to Rush Limbaugh everyday,” Levey says. “But my family had strong family values. I was raised in a loving, caring household that let me be a free thinker.”

…

And the most tedious for most gayby boomers: What’s your sexual orientation?

The answers to these questions are as varied as the lives of gayby boomers themselves.

Take the question about missing a mom and dad. Jeff DeGroot, 23, was raised by two lesbian mothers in Oregon. He doesn’t buy the argument that there’s a void in his life because he never had a dad toss a baseball to him.

“My parents can throw a baseball and take me hiking just as well as any man could,” DeGroot says. “I’ve always had a plethora of male role models. I never felt that I was missing anything by not having that dad for me.”

Read the full story here.

SAME-SEX WEDDINGS: HEARTLAND STYLE

(CNN) — The art of dodging tossed wedding bouquets had been mastered by Cindy Pollard. At 52, and with plenty of experience celebrating the big day for others, she’d learned how to back into corners and disappear when brides sent those flowers flying.

Now, Pollard can dive for them.

“I have seven brothers and sisters, and I’ve been to all of their weddings,” she said, her words catching on emotion. “It’s just something you never thought you’d get to do.”

Everything changed for this Iowa nurse on April 3, when the Midwestern state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled to overturn a ban on same-sex marriages. On that day, Pollard proposed to Gayla Snook, her partner of 10 years …

According to a study conducted by The Williams Institute, a UCLA School of Law-based think tank that researches sexual orientation law and policy, more than 2,900 of the state’s same-sex couples will marry within three years and nearly 55,000 out-of-state couples may flock to Iowa for the honor.

…

For Alisha Hennessy, who was adopted at 8 by Mike Yowell and Hersh Rodasky of Council Bluffs, the Supreme Court decision finally gives her parents –together for 28 years — what she’s wanted for them since she was 10. The two men already had a civil ceremony, and later this summer, they’ll receive a blessing in their Episcopal church.

“Now they can do what my husband and I did,” said Hennessy, 26, a teaching assistant in Omaha, Nebraska. “And I get to have the privilege to walk my parents down the aisle.”

Read the full story here.

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