Today's Must Read: Who's really hurt by banning gays from adopting children

Hint: It isn't queers who suffer the most. Fred Grimm at the Miami Herald explains.

Painfully bittersweet

Last night I cheered Barack Obama's historic victory and toasted him with champagne. This morning I'm overwhelmed by pain.

Voters in Arizona and Florida banned marriage equality. Voters in Arkansas denied lesbians, gays and single heterosexuals the right to foster children and adopt. And most horrific of all, it looks like voters in California are taking the right to marry away from lesbian and gay couples.

To put this into perspective...

* If the Arkansas ban had been the law in Kansas when my life partner died of cancer, I would never have been able to adopt the son I had raised. Because she was his biological parent and I was invisible under the law, he would have lost both parents because of the death of one.

* Nearly 20,000 same-sex couples in California no longer know whether their marriages are legal. And the children of all same-sex couples throughout this nation woke up this morning to once again learn that their families are reviled.

Court declares Florida gay adoption ban to be unconstitutional

Circuit Judge David J. Audlin Jr. says the ban hurts children and violates both the state and federal constitutions, The Miami Herald reports.

A proposal that would ban same-sex couples from fostering or adopting children in Arkansas is on the ballot in November.

Feminist Musings: What if you don't want to have kids?

By Diane Silver

My co-conspirator on this blog, Nancy Jane Moore, has an interesting post up at Ambling Along Aqueduct about making the choice not to have kids. In part, Nancy writes:

What we all need to do -- regardless of whether we plan to be parents or not -- is to make decisions about what we're going to do with our lives: what kind of work we're going to do, what kind of path we're going to take. We all have dreams and ambitions -- destinies of one kind or another. And children aren't destinies.

After all, we don't just live to reproduce ourselves.

Nancy, by the way, is an Aqueduct author.