E-Mail This Article to a Friend Nature of nurture For many newly married gay and lesbian couples, legal union affirmed entire families, complete with children, homes, and joint finances BY DEIRDRE FULTON
	Related links Family Pride Coalition The largest national gay-and-lesbian family organization’s Web site offers advocacy, support, and education materials. Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE) On this site, find a COLAGE pen pal, locate the nearest COLAGE chapter, or just learn more about kids who have gay and lesbian moms and dads. MassEquality This 50-member coalition of GLBT-equality organizations is leading the grassroots, lobbying, and legislative battles for equal-marriage rights in Massachusetts. Check here for the latest same-sex-marriage news, or to join MassEquality’s growing network of volunteers. Freedom to Marry Coalition of Massachusetts Another prominent pro-marriage state organization that offers advocacy tools, volunteer opportunities, and legislative updates. Alternative Family Matters This Cambridge-based resource offers a support network for moms, dads, and kids with alternative family arrangements. Founded by Jenifer Firestone, who has a 12-year-old daughter with a gay couple, the organization offers counseling, support groups, and expert advice. On Wednesday, May 25, Alternative Family Matters will hold a free info session from 6:45 to 9 p.m. at the South End Community Health Center for straight, lesbian, and bisexual women who are interested in having a child with a sperm donor. Focus on the Family To prepare for some of the other side’s arguments, get your lunacy cheat sheets here.

RELIGIOUS-RIGHT-WINGERS usually argue that their fierce opposition to gay marriage is based on the threat it poses to "family values" rather than on fear, homophobia, or plain old prejudice. But that contention doesn’t square with families like the Bournes — Rhonda and Erika, who live on a quiet street in Waltham with their five-year-old adopted daughter, Lili. "We bust our butts so our child can have an excellent education," Rhonda Bourne says. "We teach her right from wrong. That’s family values."

Nor is it consistent with the ethos of the home shared by Deb Kennedy, Linda O’Brien, and their adopted children, Kordell, seven, Ishi, four, and Jianna, two. Like many Massachusetts couples eager to establish a family, the two women went through the state Department of Social Services to adopt their three children. Ishi came first, when he was just four months old. Then, two years ago, Deb and Linda adopted Kordell and his baby sister, Jianna.

Kordell had spent years being shuttled from one foster-care arrangement to the next, and because he’s old enough to remember that experience, his moms’ marriage had deep significance for him. "It was really meaningful for him in his search for family," Kennedy says, and if marriage rights got wrenched away now, "it would be devastating for him the most."

In just under a year, about 5000 couples much like Kordell’s parents and the Bournes have enjoyed the legal right to marry in Massachusetts. For many of them, legal union affirmed not only single relationships, but entire families, complete with children, homes, and finances. When legislators reconsider the amendment at this session’s Constitutional Convention (see "Fight for the Rights," next page), they’ll have all this new evidence to weigh. The prosaic everydayness of gay and lesbian families — made easier when love is grounded in institutional sanction — is precisely what pro-equality advocates plan to highlight in the next high-profile battle for equal-marriage rights, when state Senate president Robert Travaglini reconvenes the Constitutional Convention at an as-yet-undetermined date this year to consider a state-constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage and establish civil unions in Massachusetts.

HERE IN Massachusetts, the benefits that marriage provides to the children of same-sex couples are somewhat intangible. Because same-sex couples have been able to file jointly for co-parent adoptions since 1993, protections relating to, say, health insurance or custody in the event of a partner’s death were for the most part already taken care of. (Custody in the event of separation was never covered; now, because marriage rights provide for divorce rights, child-custody negotiations will be much less complicated.) And, because Massachusetts marriages won’t be recognized in most other states, co-parent adoptions are still necessary in case a couple moves, or even travels, over state lines.

Aside from the money spouses save by claiming each other as dependents or filing joint state income taxes (money Erika Bourne wants to put toward Lili’s college fund), there aren’t many child-specific financial benefits of marriage.

Nor are there many day-to-day changes. For same-sex spouses, the post-marriage routines aren’t any different. Meg Soens, mother of two sets of twins, still plays chauffeur for her eight- and 11-year-old children. Linda O’Brien still runs out for pepperoni pizza and Greek salad on Friday nights. Erika Bourne still has to take Lili to the doctor on a Saturday morning to investigate a nagging cough. Dale Belcher, a stay-at-home dad with three kids, still struggles when three-year-old Soka, like any toddler, "decides she has an opinion on what she wears in the morning."

And for the kids, it’s even more business as usual.

"Nothing’s really changed," says Richard Oliveira Soens, an 11-year-old Pokémon addict, whose most significant memories of his moms’ wedding involve the catered food. "Except now, things are official." And when seven-year-old Kordell O’Brien reads aloud an entire Dr. Seuss book, All About Me, it says more about how much he likes baseball and how much he dislikes broccoli than it does about having two moms.

However, whether or not young children are able to articulate what it means to them, "everyone knows what that word means, marriage," says Adam Glick, a Brookline psychotherapist who serves lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth and adults. "The most important thing that kids need is a safe and secure and consistent home life. One thing that helps that sense of security is a formal, recognized relationship."

There’s not a lot of long-term data on the children of two-mom and two-dad households (and less about gay dads than about lesbian moms). However, existing studies refute any suggestion that the kids of same-sex couples are disadvantaged socially, sexually, or emotionally, according to pediatrician Ellen Perrin, a leading expert on the subject who teaches at the Tufts–New England Medical Center.

A 2004 American Psychological Association study, which examined much of the existing data and research on the children of gay and lesbian parents, knocked down the three most commonly cited major concerns — that the children will be teased and ostracized, that growing up without a mother or a father figure would result in gender confusion, and that children of gay and lesbian parents will grow up to be gay or lesbian — claiming there simply wasn’t enough data to support any of them.

On the contrary, says Perrin: "For children’s emotional growth and development and appropriate psychological development, what they need is permanence, stability, and a guarantee that we’re in it for the long haul."