This is a victory for the American people; it’s a victory for our justice system.

That’s attorney Ted Olson, commenting on Judge Vaughn Walker’s ruling, released yesterday, that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional and violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantees of due process and equal protection. Watch more of his remarks below (h/t, Joe. My. God.):

It is surely among the most personal and profound wins for our community. Judge Walker’s ruling eviscerates the baseless and empty arguments of our opponents. Walker found that there was simply no credible, rational, believable, or persuasive reason to take the right to marry away from same-sex couples. Our opponents had a team of very fine lawyers, and at the end of the trial, the evidence they presented in support of Prop 8 made abundantly clear that other than discomfort or hostility, there is no justifiable basis for excluding us from the same right to marry that’s enjoyed by every other couple in this country.

That’s part of Kate Kendell’s statement follwing the ruling. Read more at her blog here: “A Landmark Victory for Justice and Our Families.”

There’s a blizzard of coverage of this — or so it seems, from the media I watch; seven of the top ten “keywords” tracked on Twitter last night had to do with this verdict. An eloquent New York Times editorial appeared that very afternoon: “Marriage is a Constitutional Right.”

There’s much more to say than I have time for here; still more to be read all over the internet elsewhere. I will say this, though: there are many battles to fight in the larger struggle for LGBT civil rights.  But given the meticulous care with which Judge Walker dismantled the substantiations for legal discrimination against LGBT people, this win will ramify far and wide. I can’t imagine its impact will be felt only in the arena of marriage law. As many have said, regardless of its fate at the Federal District Court of Appeals level (next up), and the Supreme Court, should they decide to hear it (next after that), Walker provided “findings of fact” regarding our social treatment, our lack of social harm, and our consequent need for equal protection that simply become legal precedent. For that, I am extremely extremely grateful.

Take a look at the decision yourself. As Dr. Maddow said on her show last night, it makes great reading, probably better than the novel you’re reading right now. Or (I’m happy to add, today) the blog.

Though I am thinking of them.

An impressive and spirited number of those who haven’t seen the film are cocksure (d’oh!) they know precisely what it’s about and what cultural impact it will have, and are therefore both avoiding it like the plague and denouncing its writer-director. (”No cash for this trash!” one commenter declared; “Lisa Cholodenko is an idiot!” concluded another.)

To which I can only sigh and moan: My people, my people.  That, and periodically jump on one of the up-and-down ostriches and try to talk sense into the cantankerous menagerie.

As one who not only saw the film but found it breathtakingly subversive — think New Yorker cover that takes you at least ten seconds to “get,” and then after you do you go, “Wow,” or “Ha!” and appreciate the value of art that much more  (e.g., this recent one)– I am storing up observation after observation and look forward to doing up at least one post later this week reflecting (and inviting dialog) on what in the hell is up with our people and this issue that so many of us would be so, well, reactionary.  (I am also feverishly trying to scratch out the time to finish transcribing and writing up my round-table interview with director Cholodenko and actor Bening).

My least favorite theory about this tempest-in-a-stewpot is that Fox News has polluted all of contemporary American culture, not just its viewers, such that reasoned debate based on valid, primary source evidence (which one has actually reviewed oneself) has become old hat, hopelessly too 20th century.

Another, maybe less dreary theory is that a lot of online debate has the subtlety of a big ole bar fight. Between anonymous people. Who have no prior or enduring relationship to one another. The sober ones, who root their objections in sincere, very valid concerns, are often inaudible above the din, or at risk of being knocked out and silenced by an errant swing.

Is the Jules character in The Kids Are All Right a kind of a white lesbian Bigger Thomas? Maybe, maybe not. But the question, I hope, indicates that one has to think a bit, and with a modicum of subtlety,  to answer it. Also, just as one would have had to have read Native Son to pass judgment on the Bigger character and Richard Wright, one pretty much has to see the The Kids Are All Right to determine what one thinks about the Jules/Paul storyline and Lisa Cholodenko’s treatment of it.

Now, to the actual carousel ride of the post title! A sweet, 2 minute 37 second detour into the experience of a three and a half-year old boy! Hope it’s as calming to you as it is to me. [Apologies: it's Baba's first iPhone video, and I'm no videographer.]  Minimal dialog, nice soundtrack. The one audible line uttered by my son I think does a good job of summing up a lot of the problem with the Kids debate amongst what I can only assume, perhaps wrongly, is a predominantly non-parent crowd: “Baba, your whole body is in the way of my face.”

I am proud to say that I was a hard sell for The Kids Are All Right, the family comedy-drama starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore and opening in limited release on July 9th.  A mainstream film featuring a lesbian-headed family?!  And the leads are among two of the finest actors working right now? With seven Oscar nominations between ‘em? Oh you betcha I’m there.  But I’m there with both expectations and hackles raised.  The attitude I bring to the movie theater approximates what you might bring to the living room in which your daughter’s prom date sits. Hopefully nervously.

Picture your kid, a sweet tender thing you’ve dedicated the last decade and a half to protecting and promoting, who deserves the best, or at least a fair shake, goddamn it.  And then there’s the date, a Usual Suspect with a history of stringing folks along and then breaking their hearts, or worse.  The sweet tender thing in this construction, though, is me and my people: lesbians, even more specifically, lesbian-headed families, and the kids in them. The prom date I’m looking askance at? Commercial Hollywood film.

I have a right to be squinty-eyed.  For most of my movie-going life, commercial Hollywood film has left me and mine either ignored along the walls surrounding the dance floor, quietly convincing ourselves of our worth despite the lack of  attention, or attended to for just a moment, only to be betrayed in the next, accidentally or even maliciously.

I will never forget sitting, or rather eventually slinking down lower and lower in my seat, in a suburban Minneapolis movie theater watching Basic Instinct in the early 1990s.  A mainstream Hollywood movie that had a lesbian in it! Plus a bisexual woman!  I had to go, and took with me my gal sweetie, a friend, and her gal sweetie.  The overwhelmingly heterosexual crowd watched placidly as blood splattered the screen in the opening scene, and then – I’m not making this up – later groaned and called out in disgust when Sharon Stone kisses her female lover.  For Michael Douglass’ benefit.  Which lover, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be a homicidal, suicidal, man-hating basket case.

Things were only a tad better in the mid-1990s romantic comedy Chasing Amy. Again, I was lured to the theater with the hopes that somehow, something resembling “our” truths would win out over “their” fantasies about us. Turned out, not so much. Ben Affleck made his big screen debut playing – surprise! – the handsome, charming guy who turns the heretofore disgruntled lesbian gal happy and straight.  I’m oversimplifying just a tad here, but not much.  I remember spending about 45 minutes after the movie trying to explain to an open-minded-yet-ignorant straight guy chum just what in the Sam Hill was wrong with all that.

Yes, there have been finer moments for us gals in mainstream film – Bound, the noir thriller with Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon springs eagerly to mind – but the disappointments have been heavy ones. Tragedy, pathology, and disposability have figured way, way too large in our film presence thus far. If we’ve been present at all.

I offer up these highlights of my theater-going past in order to help explain the squint in my eye as I entered the theater for a sneak preview of The Kids Are All Right. The good news is that, in the ten to twenty years since I slunk down in that theater seat, interesting things have been happening to me and mine, not least of which has been that we’ve been gayby-booming big time.  That, and we’ve been winning bits and snatches of civil rights, even if we’re shoved one step back for every two steps we take forward.  And some of  us — some super-smart ones at that — have been worming our ways up through film school and the film-making industry, becoming Hollywood’s best kept secret.

This, as you might have suspected, leads us directly to writer-director (and lesbian mum) Lisa Cholodenko and her new film The Kids Are All Right.  You may recall Cholodenko’s work in the creepy but compelling High Art, in which Allie Sheedy’s junkie art photographer seduces Rhada Mitchell’s ambitious magazine editor, Patricia Clarkson dripping around in the background as a tragicomic former Fassbinder actress).  Or perhaps you’ll remember the somewhat less creepy but equally naughty Laurel Canyon, in which Frances McDormand’s Los Angeles music mogul seduces the young lead singer of the band she’s producing, while her uptight son Christian Bale watches his fiancée Kate Beckinsdale slip deeper and deeper into his mother’s debauched scene.  Both are closely observed, deeply atmospheric studies of boundaries transgressed and innocents seduced.

The atmosphere is far sunnier in The Kids Are All Right, but seduction is still afoot.  The interesting question is, Who is being drawn into whose world? Annette Bening plays Nic, a high-strung, wine-swilling, bread-winning doctor; Julianne Moore plays her partner Jules, flaky and aimless, who’s taking a stab at landscape design, her third career foray. Their older daughter Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska (late of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland), hangs in that delicate, thoughtful summertime suspension between high school and college.

It’s Joni’s younger brother Laser, played by teen heartthrob Josh Hutcherson (late of Journey to the Center of the Earth), who bookends the film.  His character provides catalyst for the film’s movement, both in its breezy opening scenes as he cycles through L.A. with a skateboarding chum, and when he asks his sister – who’s of age now – to contact the man whose sperm their mothers used to conceive them.  To Cholodenko and her co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg’s credit, the plot exposition, even around such potentially puzzling matters as identity release sperm donation, moves swiftly and clearly. (”Identity release” sperm donors are those who choose to be accessible to children conceived with their sperm upon the children’s reaching adulthood. Others are either known all along, officially or personally, or are anonymous.) At the end of the film, it’s Laser’s vision we’re left with.

Mark Ruffalo plays Paul, every lesbian’s dream/nightmare sperm donor: he’s a handsome, affable, organic veggie-growing, funky upscale restaurant-running, motorcycle-riding, magnetic dude. As in, steal away the kids’ affections magnetic.  Hi-jinx and complexity ensue when he responds to the kids’ request to meet him, goes on to meet the moms, and hires Jules to redesign his garden.

Suffice to say that, because this is a story, by definition requiring tension and conflict to exist, stuff happens.  Stuff which, because this is a story, has no obligation to be completely plausible, least of all statistically significant — it just has to be plausible enough, and work within the confines of the characters’ journeys in the film.  This is stuff which the trailer lays bare, and while it might send many folks to the movie with happy expectation (man candy! more images of Mark Ruffalo in the buff!), it will saddle others with a gnawing dread.  No disrespect to Mr. Ruffalo, who was engaging throughout, but I sympathize with that dread (if it could speak, it would be muttering from between clenched teeth, “If our first shot at a lesbian family’s mainstream film portrayal gets splatt-balled by another hetero romance I’ll scream!”).

To those of you feeling that dread gnawing at you, I say, “Scream not. Wait out the movie before you alarm your fellow theater goers. Cholodenko and Blumberg are up to something interesting here.”  As to the rest, I say, “Get ready for plenty of Mark Ruffalo’s fuzzy nekkid body in flagrante delicto!”

I’ll step aside here to note that if you must have more plot synopsis I direct you to the many other reviews of the film – from NPR (“an adorably high-spirited romp” that “puts the fun in dysfunction”) to the Chicago Tribune (“instant classic”) to the Los Angeles Times, (“witty, urbane, and thoroughly entertaining”) to Salon.com, (“ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history”). [Added later: Also A.O. Scott at the New York Times ("nearly perfect"). Or, still later, my current fave in the MSM: the clears-the-right-intellectual-hurdles Dana Stevens in Slate ("the portrait of this couple's decades-long bond underscores the absurdity of the debate about what to call same-sex unions.") And still later: our inveterate and most astute Dana Rudolph at Mombian ("the perfect lesbian mom date movie") Now how often do you hear THAT?] I find myself  in agreement with most of them, with the sad exception of Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review, whose mis-read toward the end reveals far more about the reviewer’s blinkered vision, I fear, than the film’s heart.

I’ll further note that yet more commentary on the film’s social and political statements will follow in a future post in which I slice up and share the fruits of a media roundtable I participated in with the director and Ms. Bening. Now back to the review.

As in Bound, which took familiar noir plot elements for a lesbian spin, Kids takes familiar elements – a young woman’s coming of age and cutting the apron strings that bind, in this case two pairs of ‘em; an established couple’s relationship, sagging with neglect, rocked by the introduction of a new element; a family’s stretching and reshaping as it undergoes inevitable transformations – and breathes new life in them as they’re re-told by fresh voices.  The acting throughout is superb; even the young castmembers hold their own among towering vets like Bening and Moore.  You want to watch each of these people.  And Cholodenko lets you: she holds the camera on them just long enough so that we see the twinkle of complexity and paradox in moment after moment – and then cuts before it’s a moment too long.

The dialog crackles with wit, ringing true and revealing – most entertainingly in Ruffalo’s Paul, who spouts a cornucopia of groovy dudeisms.  In a heart-to-heart with Laser about his bad-element friend, Paul says “That’s not ‘amped,’ that’s just being a tool.” Or, in lieu of “shut the f**k up”: “shut the front door.” In a rare and well-earned moment of communion with Nic, he reaches for her hand and says, jovially,“My brother from another mother!”

It’s a tribute to the strengths of the performances – Ms. Bening’s being by far the most riveting– that so much of the character development and plot movement happens outside of the dialog, in reaction shots.   Bening is simply a joy to watch, and in one minutes’ long scene in particular, she takes Nic through a series of thoughts and feelings, first casual, then building concern, then finally shocked gravity.  Cholodenko keeps the camera close on her face, the ambient sound at a distance, then brings the sound in all warbly, as if underwater.  It’s the only self-consciously “filmic” moment in the movie, and it’s well-spent.  If a single scene can earn you an Oscar nomination, this one would be it for Bening in this film.

There’s lots more to enjoy about The Kids Are All Right – the infectious, über-groovy soundtrack, the disciplined attention to detail (when we first see him, Paul chomps an apple as he exits his organic garden, a guy Eve; both Nic and Jules sip their morning coffee out of “World’s Best Mom” mugs).  The laugh-out-loud humor.  During an exquisitely awkward scene, Laser asks why his moms had gay male porn (rather than lesbian porn) in their dresser drawer (it’s a long story how he got there).  Moore’s Jules begins to explain the mysteries of externalized desire in an abstract, blurry intellectual fashion, going on to say, “Anyway, with lesbian porn, usually they hire two straight women to do the scenes, and the inauthenticity—“ “That’s enough!” blurts Nic, hastily interrupting.  It’s as if the screenwriters were smiling and winking at every audience member — the lesbo-cogniscenti and the along-for-the-ride visitors alike.

The main thing to enjoy about this film, though, is the love of people in it – all the people, even the cads. I went twice, which helped, since my appreciation, like the wine Nic knocks back throughout the film, became deeper and more nuanced over time.  The first time I saw it was several weeks ago with an old friend, the second time was last night with my old partner – we’ll be together 16 years this month.  She laughed out loud throughout the first hour-plus, and then for the last twenty minutes held my hand in a vice grip as she dabbed at her eyes and sniffled.  We have two kids, after all,  closely resembling those in the film.  Give or take a decade or so.  What we saw up on the screen was something we’re utterly unaccustomed to seeing there: not just something nearer to our relationship and our family than we’ve ever seen, but the reflection back of something deeper.  The simple fact we know to be true: our kids are all right. So are we all.

[cross-posted at BlogHer]

My favorite, probably, among so much news of that day: both Boies and Olson said, in the press conference afterward, that this has been “the most important case of their lives.”  Yes, that Boies and Olson. The they fought over who got to be the 43rd President of the United States Boies and Olson.

Many have said — history has shown — that the brilliance of the reasoning on behalf of justice is not what determines whether and when it is administered. True enough. But damn, it’s nice to hear how hammer-loud and how clarion-clear its bell was rung yesterday.

Dear LD,

Yesterday we heard compelling closing arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the federal challenge to Proposition 8. NCLR was in the courtroom live-tweeting, making sure that you shared this historical moment with us. During the trial we gave you daily analysis of the testimony, and today you can read our analysis of closing arguments on Pam’s House Blend.

I was in the courtroom and had the honor of watching this highly-skilled legal team in action. This trial has been a truly historic moment for our community. It is the first time a federal court has heard, first hand, from real live witnesses, about the harm that the denial of marriage equality causes same-sex couples and their families every day. It is also the first time a federal court has heard the arguments in favor of marriage equality presented live in court by an array of internationally renowned scholars who are truly experts in their respective fields. Check out my vlog on yesterday’s closing arguments, which were as powerful as the testimony heard at the trial.

watch video

Judge Walker will announce his ruling soon, and as we’ve been there for you during the trial, NCLR will be with you at the end to discuss what the ruling means for our community and our fight for equality. I am so excited to announce our newest benefit to NCLR members: a members-only live chat with NCLR attorneys on the day of ruling where you can discuss the results with our legal experts.

If you’re not yet an NCLR member (membership starts at just $40), I hope you’ll join today—not only will you not want to miss this important web chat, but NCLR couldn’t do what we do without the support of donors just like you. We couldn’t have live-tweeted this entire trial without the support of our donors. And you can trust that your support will be put to use right away to fight for equality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and families.

No matter what happens next, this was a landmark moment in history. I hope you will continue to stand with us as the next chapter unfolds.

In Solidarity,

Kate Kendell

Executive Director, NCLR

P.S. If you’re already a member, the day before the ruling, I’ll send you an email with your registration information and all the pertinent instructions so you can get your questions about the trial answered by our attorneys. I am so glad we are able to offer this new benefit to you—this is one small way we can say, “thank you!” for your vital support.

The funny little mixed mail bag that is the same-sex couple’s tax return today.

All the same-sex married folk in Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Conneticut, the District of Columbia are sending in one state form and two federal forms today.  Folks in New York and Maryland are also recognized at the state level, wherever they got hitched, so them, too.

Here in the Golden State, we got 18,000 in-state recognized same-sex married folk (those that rushed up the gang plank between June 16 and November 5, 2008, before it got yanked up), plus Registered Domestic Partners, who, as of 2007, were granted the right to file state taxes jointly.

Add to this anyone else same-sex coupled who got legally married anywhere else BEFORE NOVEMBER 5, 2008.  When the gang plank got yanked up, it left you on the dock, too. Sorry.  Pre-election day 2008 recognitions do include happy unions in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and South Africa (except I don’t know when each of those countries legally recognized our partnerships; some could well have been after November 5, 2008 in which case yer SOL).

Nepal and Portugal, thank you, but your recognitions will be too late for CA state residents. The rest of you-all’s, if you’re now in-state residents, you get to file one state form, too.  Yay!

Confused? Move to Nevada! Or get yourself a nice, queer, tax preparer. We did.

I haven’t counted up all the gay coupled folk in every state of the union that has no partner recognition, some kind of state-level “Defense” of (Heterosexual) Marriage Act,  otherwise known as hell NO we aren’t recognizing you people, no way, no how! Even if some reasonable-thinking person in another state did!

All of us in every state of the union, thanks to the federal Defense of Marriage Act, signed by President Clinton in 1996?  Two federal forms!  (Here’s your ever-updated Relationship Recognition map, from NGLTF. Current iteration: March 17, 2010!) The patchwork quilt of piecemeal equality.

If you’re inspired to follow up on how much all this fun costs us, check out the piece that ran in The New York Times last October: The High Price of Being a Gay Couple.

Regarding the fear on behalf of the children meme, which has been widely attributed to be among the arguments that (yet again) reversed another state’s marriage equality gain: when “gay marriage” is taught in the schools — which of course it won’t be, not “taught” per se; marriage of any sort isn’t “taught,” but the fact that two men or two women could marry, if they wanted, sure; that’s what would or could be conveyed when or if the topic arose in the states in which such unions are no longer illegal  – kids like these would be the primary beneficiaries. Talkin’ about those two in that picture up there. They’re real people.

This is what would happen in the classroom in which “gay marriage” was “taught.”  Kids like these would, for the short duration of the reference, see a key aspect of their family reflected in their most important public sphere community. They would benefit, and so too would the two children (at least two per class of twenty) who will grow up to fall in love and make a life together, maybe even a family together, with a person of their same sex.

These children are already who they are, right now, in classrooms all across America, in nearly every county of the nation, in same-sex marriage permissive and same-sex marriage hostile states alike. Go ahead and ask the last US Census.

So, what about the children?

So, fellow progressives, stop thinking about suicide or moving abroad. Want to feel better? Eat a sour grape, then do something immediately, now, today. Figure out what you can do to help rescue the country — join something, send a little money to some group, call somewhere and offer to volunteer.

• – Molly Ivins, in a nationally syndicated column
• published two days after George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004

Thanks to Julia Rosen, tireless organizer and Online Political Director for Courage Campaign, for getting these words into my inbox today before I went to the nearest lobster emporium, blasted that B-52’s song, and did things I would later regret.

And for additional moral support, there’s this trenchant post from Kate Kendell at NCLR on her blog this morning: “The Day After a Hard Night.” She closes with these words:

We have the privilege of living in the midst of our own civil rights movement. The cost of that privilege is the same cost it has been in every movement–our humanity and dignity is attacked and undermined and we stand tall, never give up, and never lose faith.  Today is a test, and we must be the measure of it.

Philip Spooner’s testimony on behalf of LGBT marriage equality before the Maine legislature has become a YouTube phenomenon. I ran it in the sidebar here some time ago, but (like Pam Spaulding), I’m inspired to run it again today. (More Spoonerism yesterday at the LA Times.)

A full transcription of what he said is over at this post at Box Turtle Bulletin. Here’s some of it:

I am 86 years old, a lifetime Republican, and an active VFW Chaplan. I still serve three hospitals and two nursing homes, and I also serve Meals on Wheels for nine years. My wife of 54 years, Jenny, died in 1997. Together we had four children including one gay son. All four of our boys were in service.

I was born on a potato farm north of Caribou and Perham, where I was raised to believe that all men are created equal, and I never forgot that. I served in the U.S. Army in 1942 to 1945, in the First Army as a medic and as an ambulance driver. I worked with every outfit over there including Patton’s Third Army. I saw action in all five major battles in Europe including the Battle of the Bulge. My unit was awarded a Presidential Citation for transporting more patients with fewer actions than any other ambulance unit in Europe. And I was in the liberation of Paris. After the war, I carried POWs back from Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia, and also hauled hundreds of injured Germans back to Germany.

I’m here today because of a conversation I had last June when I was voting. A woman at my polling place asked me, “Do you believe in equality of gay and lesbian people?”

I was pretty surprised to be asked a question like that. It made no sense to me. Finally I asked her, “What do you think our boys fought for on Omaha Beach?”

For the first time in U.S. electoral history, Maine could turn the tide today and defend LGBT rights (wrongly, as yet incessantly) up for popular vote. I am ready for that tide to turn. Über number-cruncher Nate Silver seems to think it will.

Me, I’ll be holding my breath all day.  And saying the obvious: if any of you know anyone (who might know anyone who might know anyone) who lives in Maine, please call to help get out the vote.

Our eyes are on you and our hearts are with you in Maine, in Kalamazoo, MI, and in Washington State. (Louise, Pam’s House Blend is a fierce Maine ally, has been all over this the whole time. Here’s her post on the last day of the campaign there. [Update: and a few more here, "Maine News Updates, Tidbits, and Rumors," and here, "Final Newspaper Clippings/Maine Blog Stories."] Don Davis at Bilerico has a comprehensive day-of analysis of Washington’s Ref. 71 polling here.)

I wasn’t going to come to you to ask for money again. We’ve asked so much, and you’ve dug deep and really come through.

Honestly, I wouldn’t take my time away from managing our Get Out The Vote operation to send this email if it wasn’treally important.

But we just heard that Yes on 1 is increasing their TV ad buy by $25,000 today.

$25,000 buys a lot of TV ads in Maine.

With the money we have now, we simply can’t counter their arguments on TV.

You and I have both invested a lot in this campaign. I won’t– I can’t– let them win this because we couldn’t come up with the last $25,000 in the final 36 hours.

We can’t let Yes on 1 win the airtime war with their misleading, and factually inaccurate ads.

We can’t let Yes on 1 lie to Maine voters about schools and teachers and children and same-sex couples in Maine.

We need to stand up and match every one of their lies with an ad of our own, that explains that marriage equality won’t do anything to families but protect all of them.

And I need you to help. Can you come through one last time and give $50 to help us finish this campaign with a win?

https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/noon1redalert

Jesse Connolly
Campaign Manager
NO on 1/Protect Maine Equality

For folks in Washington State and Kalamazoo, MI (the other LGBT civil rights hotspots this election), The Task Force has links to the organizations coordinating Get Out The Vote efforts there and in Maine: “Still time to secure victory on Election Day!”

I had a Banned Books Week / LGBT families in children’s lit post all queued up and ready for its final powdering, but have to set it aside after reading on Tuesday evening that the Langbehn v. Jackson Memorial Hospital case was dismissed yesterday by its Florida judge.

Janice Langbehn, for those who can’t place where you heard her name (if not from here, in February and August of last year), is the woman whose partner of 18 years, Lisa Pond, suffered an aneurism just as they were about to embark on an R Family vacation cruise with their three children. They were in Miami. The hospital barred all of Lisa’s family from seeing her, because, in the words of the hospital social worker, they were in “an anti-gay state.” (Family? What family?)  Janice tells the whole story here, on the blog she started for their family.

The more you read about their life together — the 25 children they fostered over the years, the four they adopted, Lisa’s Girl Scout troop — and the more you read about the lengths Janice went to to try to gain access to Lisa for herself and their children — the more vivid and the more unthinkable their inhumane treatment becomes.  Lambda Legal argued her case against the hospital; their page on the case is here.  Janice posted the judge’s motion to dismiss the case here. I — and any other LD readers as ignorant in the minutia of the law as I — welcome anyone’s armchair analysis / translation of its import.  Lambda and the family have until October 16 to take the next step, whatever that may be.

Two more things:

(1) Look at Lambda Legal’s Tools for Protecting Your Health Care Wishes, but with this caveat: Janice and Lisa had medical power of attorney for one another, and Janice had them faxed to the hospital in one of her many attempts to do everything possible to have their family status recognized by the hospital staff.  It was the bigotry and inhumanity of the hospital staff that kept them apart, when other family members, including small children, were welcomed to visit other patients in same critical care area there. (Nolo Press explains more about Powers of Attorney for Health Care here.) And,

(2) the Langbehn-Pond family lives in Washington state. Right now people in Washington are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their strong domestic partnership law. Referendum 71 needs to pass for it to stay on the books, and for all Washington families to be treated fairly, especially in times of crisis, and  for all families to be provided the same protections under the law. So if you haven’t done what you can to support their battle there, please do. For the Langbehn-Pond family, if for no one else.

A visual to leave you with: NGLTF keeps and regularly updates a map of all the states with laws on the books that, in one way or another, throw barriers between us and safe, proper, ethical, full legal recognition.  And sometimes throw barriers between us and our very own families. A sobering note: only the clear white states have no prohibitions on same-sex partnerships.

Click on the image to see it at its full-page resolution: