Archive for the ‘Adoption’ Category

Too Much Information

Tuesday, June 7th, 2011

There is a lot of information that can help a teacher figure out how best to help a student learn.  Seemingly irrelevant data such as who the child lives with, what language (or languages) are spoken at home, and if the child has any medical issues are all clues a teacher can use tailor lessons to a child’s specific situation.  There’s one bit of information, however, that I simply can’t imagine anyone at a child’s school needing to know — but that didn’t stop one school district from asking for it.

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Florida Boys Get New Parents

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

It shouldn’t be news, actually.  Foster kids get adopted all the time.  Not as often as we’d all like, certainly, but it does happen.  So why would anyone care that Martin Gill adopted his two foster children?  Gill was the boys’ foster parent for 6 years before the adoption became final on Wednesday.  But it’s not so much the adoption itself that’s noteworthy but the route Gill took to get there.  You see, Martin Gill is gay and, until recently, Florida was the only state in the nation with a law on the books that barred homosexuals from adopting.  That is no longer the case, thanks to Gill and the ACLU.

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Sperm Donors and the Goal of Racial Purity

Thursday, January 13th, 2011

Being the product of a marriage between a Jewish man and a Catholic woman, I will admit to being rather opposed to the idea that one should never marry outside one’s faith.  If a couple can get past their religious differences, I don’t see a problem with it.  Of course, I’m rather dismissive of religion and its influence anyway, so perhaps it’s not surprising that not everyone agrees with me.  Rabbi Dov Lior, a prestigious Rabbi in Israel and an authority on Jewish law, goes further and says that Jewish parents need to make sure their kids are 100% Jewish too.

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Your Marriage Is All About The Kids

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

According to Andrew Haines, writing in Ethika Politika, the blog of the Center for Morality in Public Life, without children, the whole point of marriage vanishes.  That is, you and your spouse don’t actually love each other; you’re just in it for the good genes.  While this is not a new theory (in fact, it is so old as to have been thoroughly debunked over and over again), Haines’ take on it is a novel one; he seems to be saying that if two people who cannot have children together are allowed to get married, everyone else’s marriage will fall apart.

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Adoption Not Final In North Carolina

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010

Imagine adopting a child and being that child’s parent for nearly a decade and then being told, oops, you’re not the parent after all.  Now imagine that the reason for this is that the child’s birth mother, with whom you were raising the child, didn’t give up her parental rights.  That’s the ruling handed down by the North Carolina Supreme Court on Monday.  Apparently, if an unmarried man wants to be a father to his partner’s child but isn’t the biological father, the mother has to give up her parental rights.

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