Children From LGBTQ Families Are So Screwed Thanks To Crappy, Archaic Laws

The passing of Amendment One in North Carolina, a law that stripped unmarried couples of ways to parent their children, isn’t the only piece of regulation hurting modern families. While Amendment One managed to take a swipe at both straight and same-sex parents, a new report determines that children of LGBTQ families are at risk pretty much everywhere in the United States.

ABC news reports that “Securing Legal Ties for Children Living in LGBT Families” details just what perils same-sex parents are confronting, specifically by living in or traveling to states that don’t recognize their unions or rights to their kids. Without recognition of a legal union or even second parent adoption, same-sex parents in some states aren’t able to put their kids on health insurance, or even make health decisions for them in emergencies. Having one “non-legal parent” also prevents kids from accessing death and disability benefits from said parent, along with inheritance. And let’s not also forget the tremendous security of being raised by that “non-legal parent” should something happen to the legally recognized one.

Even for those LGBTQ parents who have a full recognition in their home state, traveling presents quite a predicament:

“If a couple in Washington, a state with full parental recognition, goes on vacation jet skiing in Idaho and the kid gets hurt, one parent might not be recognized,” said Calla Rongerude, spokesman for the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBT think tank, and one of the co-authors of the report.

How inclined are you to take a summer vacation with the kids knowing that the ultimate safety of your child depends entirely on a “sympathetic nurse”?

“If you are a New York family visiting Philadelphia, you better take everything you have and hope there is a sympathetic nurse when you have to go to the hospital,” she said.

In more than half of the United States, more than 30 states according to ABC News, same-sex parents are gambling on that metaphoric sympathetic nurse with every day that they parent. That’s anywhere between 2 million and 2.8 million children in the United States who are being forced to live under outdated legislation that greatly impacts how double mommies and double daddies can care for them. Newsflash here but 24% of female same-sex couples, 11% of gay male couples and 38% of transgender Americans are actively raising little ones in the United States. And yet despite voter-backed rulings like Amendment One, conservative states have reportedly the highest number of same-sex families:

While states like California and New York have high numbers of same-sex couples, those most likely to be raising children live in Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Alabama, Montana, South Dakota and South Carolina, in that order.

The well-being and safety of children should occupy the center of this conversation surrounding parents and their legal ability to properly care for their kids. And yet with certain concerns that children from same-sex households “fare poorly” it would seem that even children’s well-being isn’t even something that we can all agree on.


(photo: Matthew Jacques/ Shutterstock)

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