Parenting without Protection: How Legal Status Ambiguity Affects Lesbian and Gay Parenthood

Through the lens of lesbian and gay parenthood we ask how individuals who experience “legal status ambiguity”—that which emerges when legal fluctuations combine with divided attitudes, ignorance of the law, and autonomous institutional gatekeepers—exercise their legal rights and responsibilities. The results from thirty‐one interviews with lesbian and gay parents in Oregon and their six adult children suggest that the state's fluctuating legal and social climates for lesbian and gay parenting between 1985 and 2013 presented significant challenges for two generations of same‐sex parents. Although both cohorts created and utilized a range of legal and social mechanisms to assert their legal rights, they found these rights to be controlled as much by gatekeeper perspectives as by legal force. After the 2015 Obergefell ruling on marriage equality, lesbian and gay parenting status remains a site of ongoing legal and social contestation, providing insight into the risks and challenges of legal status ambiguity.     

Frame Spillover: Media Framing and Public Opinion of a Multifaceted LGBT Rights Agenda

Between May and July 2003, a shift in how the US public viewed the legality of consensual homosexual sex occurred. While in May the largest percentage of respondents to date supported decriminalizing such activity, that percentage dropped eleven points two months later. Similar declines in support were evident in the same period over a range of gay and lesbian rights claims. The ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decriminalizing homosexual sex is the obvious intervening event. To explain this pattern, coding of print and televised news coverage of the ruling throughout 2003 was undertaken. Coverage was not overtly negative in terms of antigay rhetoric or hostility toward the judiciary; rather, the dominant media frame focused on the implications of Lawrence for an entirely separate rights issue: marriage equality. This article examines the dynamic of frame “spillover,” or the idea that media focus on a distinct and not widely supported rights claim in a multifaceted rights agenda might depress support across the entire rights agenda. The findings call for further research, and they have implications for scholarship on public opinion, social movement framing, and ideational development and policy debate as studied within the broader field of American political development.     

LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL, AND TRANSGENDER PARENTS

Estimates are that there are between 1.2 and 3 million people who are in same-gender partnered household relationships in the United States. Although there is less certainty about the number of parents among these couples and the number of single-parent gay and lesbian families, all research shows that a growing number of gay and lesbian as well as bisexual and transgender individuals are choosing to be parents. A sound body of empirical literature has demonstrated that the sexual orientation of a parent is irrelevant in terms of a person's ability to parent and has no lasting effect on the psychological adjustment of the person's children. Nevertheless, a majority of states in the United States place considerable legal hurdles in the face of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals who would like to be parents, as do many countries around the world, and the social context of contemporary society creates a number of special issues that the forensic evaluator or psychologist may encounter when asked to make a custody, adoption, or other fitness to parent assessment with LGBT parents. This article presents an overview of these issues and moves beyond theory to provide specific recommendations for evaluators working with LGBT parents.     

公民权视域下农民工权益保护的社会政策支持

农民工是中国城市中一个特殊的社会群体,由于目前中国社会制度与政策的因素,他们在城市中不能与城市居民享有同等的政治、经济及社会权利,是典型的弱势群体.从公民权视角提出农民工权益保护的社会政策支持,有利于从根本上实现农民工的城市融入,消除社会排斥.维护农民工的公民权,就必须建立城乡统一的户籍管理制度、城乡平等的劳动就业政策、分类分层的劳动社会保障政策、农民工子女教育政策和住房保障政策.     

(When) Are Rights Wrong? Rights Discourses and Indeterminacy in Gay and Lesbian Parents’Custody Cases

This paper examines the paradoxical and problematic position of rights discourses in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) parents'custody and adoption cases. In it, I analyze the ways in which different types of rights are framed by the litigants and, alternatively, by the judges, as well as how the same constitutional rights (e.g., the right to privacy) are often deployed both in defense of and in opposition to gay /lesbian parents. An in-depth analysis of judicial decisions over a 50-year period and interviews with key family law players reveal the indeterminacy and therefore complexity of rights as a strategy and a discourse in the family law context. Consistent throughout this analysis are the problematic intersection of the collective and the individual in rights-based claims, and evidence of the distinct nature of LGBT rights claims as revolutionary in both their bases and their implications. The analysis confirms in some ways, but also contradicts and complicates many assertions of the "rights critique" of the past two decades. It also suggests a more complex and less dichotomous relationship between rights, status, and contract.     

Beyond Backlash: Assessing the Impact of Judicial Decisions on LGBT Rights

This article evaluates the widespread scholarly claim that the courtroom victories of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement have invariably provoked a counterproductive political backlash. Those victories have indeed provoked conservative countermobilization, but that has not been their only or even their most prominent effect. Assessing the political reaction to the movement's judicial victories, the policy impact of those victories, and the alternative strategic paths that were available to the movement at the outset, I argue that here, as elsewhere, legal mobilization has sometimes been a promising avenue for pursuing policy changes whose prospects were otherwise quite limited.     

Belief v. Belief: Resolving LGBTQ Rights Conflicts in the Religious Workplace

Employment disputes are increasingly centered on the conflicting moral and religious values of corporations, their employees, and their customers. These conflicts are especially challenging when they involve the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) employees and customers contraposed against the religious beliefs of corporations and their owners. When religious values compete with civil rights in the employment context, a complex web of legal protections renders the outcome unclear. Conflicts over these competing rights can involve a number of broad, thorny legal disputes, including those concerning the First Amendment and Title VII, fights between secular and religious beliefs, and competition between religious beliefs and equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. This article illustrates the reasons for this growing tension between the beliefs of business owners and the beliefs of their employees. It explores recent conflicts between religion and rights in the workplace particularly in the context of LGBTQ rights, the ways in which state‐level regulation complicates these conflicts, and the potential impact of recent cases addressing these concerns. It also identifies examples of potential specific conflicts in the context of LGBTQ rights and suggests the principles that should guide the resolution of these cases, offering a framework for assessing the hierarchy that a court may use in resolving cases in which values conflict with rights in the workplace. Finally, it addresses some of the troubling implications that arise as a result of the resolution of the potential specific conflicts.     

Why People Waive Their Miranda Rights: The Power of Innocence

In a laboratory experiment, 72 participants who were guilty or innocent of a mock theft were apprehended for investigation. Motivated to avoid prosecution and trial, they were confronted by a neutral, sympathetic, or hostile male "detective" who sought a waiver of their Miranda rights. Later, 72 other participants watched videotapes of these sessions and answered questions about the detective and suspect. Strikingly, results showed that although the detective's demeanor had no effect, participants who were truly innocent were significantly more likely to sign a waiver than those who were guilty. Naively believing in the power of their innocence to set them free, most waived their rights even in the hostile detective condition, where the risk of interrogation was apparent. The conceptual and policy implications of these results are discussed.     

Sexual Orientation,Gender Identity,and Adoption Law

The legal landscape surrounding adoption by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning/queer (LGBTQ) parents continues to be dynamic and variable across the United States, yet the topic is generally viewed favorably by Americans and increasing numbers of LGBTQ adults are becoming adoptive parents. In this essay, we explore intersections of sexual orientation, gender identity, and adoption law. We discuss connections between parenting (including adoption) and marriage rights, highlight the influence of varying legal contexts and discrimination for LGBTQ adults who pursue adoption (including case examples from Florida after the gay adoption ban was lifted), and incorporating the perspectives of adoption‐agency personnel working with LGBTQ clients.     

Workers with Disabilities Between Legal Changes and Persisting Exclusion: How Contradictory Rights Shape Legal Mobilization

It has become commonplace within disability sociolegal scholarship to argue that, in the last 30 years, a new legal and policy approach to disability has emerged, leading to a paradigm shift from a social protection framework to an antidiscrimination model. Some authors have stressed, however, that the new model has not fully replaced the older social protection approach. Yet little is still known about how the coexistence of these different models impacts on the everyday experience of disability in the workplace and on potential legal mobilization. Based on interviews with workers with disabilities who mobilized the law to obtain reasonable accommodation in Belgium combined with an analysis of evolving Belgian legal schemes relating to disability, this article explores how interactions between social, labor, and antidiscrimination rights shape legal mobilization of persons with disabilities in the workplace. We find that individual's initial self‐identification as workers or persons with disabilities influences how they frame their claim and the kind of legal norms they refer to in a first stage but that both their identification and their rights consciousness evolve and change through the course of legal mobilization as they interact with various professionals and navigate between the different concepts and rights available in current law.     

‘We are Jamaicans:’ living with and challenging the criminalization of homosexuality in Jamaica

Today, some 80 countries around the world have legislation criminalizing homosexuality, while those who engage in same-sex relations risk mob violence resulting from cultural intolerance. Despite this, gay rights advocacy within these countries exists. This paper examines gay rights advocacy in Jamaica – a nation which criminalizes same-sex relations and which has been identified by observers as among the most intolerant of same-sex relations. Using interviews with gay rights activists working with Jamaica’s leading gay rights organization, this paper describes the gay rights movement in a climate of repression. It begins with an overview of Jamaican sexual values, tracing its condemnation of homosexuality to a history of plantation slavery. Next, it discusses the emergence of a gay pride movement and the development of a broad-based association for all sexual orientations and identities. Finally, it examines the advocacy and activism of the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays, a voice for Jamaica’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community. Throughout, the paper reveals how even an oppressed identity may find a voice and thrive despite the greatest of legal and cultural challenges.     

Negotiating Social Norms and Relations in the Micromobilization of Human Rights: The Case of Burmese Lesbian Activism

This article provides the first sociolegal analysis of lesbian rights activism in Myanmar. It elucidates the processes through which a group of lesbian activists navigate sexual and gender norms that oppress lesbians as sexual minorities and as women while they use human rights discourse to carry out micromobilization work, organizing constituents and building up grassroots participation in Myanmar. It analyzes how the collective deployment of human rights encompasses resistance against social norms that pose organizing obstacles for activists and the negotiations of social relations to counter them. These micromobilization processes shape whether and how activists adopt human‐rights‐based strategies and tactics. Bringing together law and society scholarship and social movement studies, the article highlights the importance of understanding human rights mobilization by marginalized populations who face multiple, overlapping forms of oppression and contend with plural sources of power.     

Rights,goals, and hard cases

Rights have two properties which prima facie appear to be inconsistent. The first is that they are conditional in the sense that one some occasions it is always justifiable for someone to act in a way which appears to be inconsistent with someone else's rights, such as when the defence of necessity applies. The second is that rights are indefeasible in the sense that they are not subject to being defeated our outweighed by utilitarian or policy considerations. If we view rules and the rights which they establish as being subject to a ceteris paribus clause, the form of which generates out the exceptions, the conditionality of rights becomes reconcilable with their nondefeasibility. Such a view of rules and rights would entail that the goals of the law and their orderings be considered as a part of the law. When so viewed, propositions about goals and their orderings become legitimate premises for legal reasoning, furnishing solutions to hard cases in the law of torts, without resort to balancing of interests or judicial discretion.     

Homosexuality and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights: What Can Be Learned from the History of the European Convention on Human Rights?

Despite differences between the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACHPR) in terms of the substantive rights guaranteed and machineries to enforce them, both instruments have been foundational in the establishment of organizations that share a common history of rejecting human rights complaints from homosexuals. Although the contemporary jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on homosexuality may contrast sharply with that of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACtHPR) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (ACmHPR) – because the ACtHPR and ACmHPR have never upheld a complaint relating to sexual orientation – the early history of the ECtHR and the former European Commission on Human Rights (ECmHR) mirrors the current African stance. This article explores what those seeking to develop gay and lesbian rights in Africa might usefully learn from the historical evolution of similar rights under the ECHR.     

Reluctant Radicals: How Moderates Shape Movements for Social Change

This essay reviews three books within the southern history literature on the white moderate's response to the civil rights movement; Kevin Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), Matthew Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006), and Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (2006). I examine how white moderates impacted the struggle for African American civil rights, and explore how this dynamic can help us understand the trajectory of the current debate over gay rights in the United States. I argue that while the US public ultimately came to support equal rights for African Americans, and has grown more tolerant of gay rights recently, they have been willing to do so only when these rights claims are framed as benefiting “deserving” segments of these populations. This shows that rights are, to some extent, contingent resources, available primarily to those citizens who fit certain ideal types, and suggests that those individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to live up to this ideal may ultimately fail to benefit from these movements.     

In the Name of Equal Rights: "Special" Rights and the Politics of Resentment in Post–Civil Rights America

This article explores the character of conservative legal activism in post–civil rights America, arguing that this activism is motivated by two related factors: (1) resentment over the increased political participation of historically marginalized Americans and (2) principled allegations that these historically marginalized Americans are making illegitimate claims for "special," not equal, rights. I argue that the allegation of special rights is tied to the activists' resentment in multiple and complex ways. On the one hand, the allegation that the rights claims of the historically marginalized are illegitimate claims for special rights is itself an expression of resentment. Like arguments that oppose redistributive social change by relying upon discourses of color blindness, states' rights, evangelical Christianity, and community harmony, special rights talk channels resentment into recognizable and intelligible forms. But, on the other hand, the use of special rights talk is not simply cover for an underlying, fully formed resentment. Instead, the allegation of special rights propels and amplifies activists' resentment, transforming it from one that is based primarily upon competing self-interests into one that is concerned with values, morality, and national identity. Special rights talk thus partially constitutes resentment; it hardens the resolve of opponents of redistributive social change, encouraging them to understand themselves as defenders not only of their own self-interests but also, primarily even, as defenders of the core American values and ideals that are promoted by equal rights and assaulted by special rights. Thus convinced that their opposition is authorized by American tradition, conservative legal activists redouble their counter-mobilization efforts, leading to an exacerbation of already tense conflicts. A case study of the nationwide anti-treaty-rights movement grounds this analysis.     

Intimate violence among underrepresented groups on a college campus

Rape, sexual violence, psychological violence, and physical violence, among college students have been a concern. Lifetime events are often studied but not violence that specifically transpires while one is in college. Underrepresented groups such as Deaf and Hard of Hearing students, students who are gay, lesbian, and bisexual, and students who are members of racial and ethnic minorities have not been studied as extensively as White, heterosexual females. The authors used several measures to investigate the incidence of sexual violence, physical and psychological abuse among underrepresented groups in a random sample of 1,028 college students at a private, northeastern, technological campus in upstate New York, United States and analyzed victimization rates by gender, race/ethnicity, auditory status, and sexual orientation. Binary logistic regression analyses found that statistically significant differences are likely to exist between members of underrepresented groups and groups in the majority. The study found statistically significant associations between Deaf and Hard of Hearing students and students who were gay, lesbian, bisexual, or other sexual orientation with psychological abuse and physical abuse. Racial and ethnic minorities and gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other sexual orientation students were significantly more at risk for sexual abuse. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other sexual orientation students, students who were members of a racial or ethnic minority, and female students were significantly more likely to be raped. Female heterosexual students were more likely to be the victim of an attempted rape. Suggestions for further research and policy implications are provided.     

Donor, father or parent? Conceiving paternity in the Australian Family Court

Planned parenthood within the international lesbian and gay communities has attracted considerable attention and controversy in the past decade. On 5 April 2002, Guest J of the Family Court of Australia acknowledged a lesbian couple as resident parents of 2-year-old 'Patrick'. This judgement was remarkable in that it signalled a break with the well-documented international legal non-recognition of lesbian non-biological parents. However, the judgement was actually a loss for the two women, who had initiated legal proceedings in a bid to have the biological father's contact visits with the child reduced. Contrary to their wishes, the biological father was awarded increased contact and a notion of 'father' was separated in law from 'parent.' In this article, via analysis of the judgement, several issues are examined. First, one dilemma Guest J was faced with was: are the best interests of a child in a lesbian-parented family served by recognizing a father as a means for a child to make sense of his biological origins, or, by allowing the child to form and maintain a 'father-like' social relationship? This dilemma made visible the somewhat arbitrary and subjective nature of the 'best interests' standard when it comes to deciding between characterizations of paternity that recognize the symbolism of biological connections versus those that recognize the blood tie as grounds for a regular paternal social relationship. In the absence of an obvious 'best interests' conclusion, the judge found himself in the difficult position of assessing both the original terms or intent of the parental agreement between the parties and the quality of the existing social relationship between biological father and child. It is argued that his assessment of both issues was, at times, coloured by an unsubstantiated assumption that the lesbian parents' concept of kinship was irrational. The 'Patrick' case also indicated the extent to which lesbians and gay men may have entirely different expectations and understandings of 'known donor' relationships. This finding is contextualized within broader historical and political developments within lesbian and gay cultures. The author's conclusion is that there is a pressing need for legislative, policy and community-based initiatives to guide and assist individuals who identify with these communities in the task of bringing children into the world.     

The Denigration of Rights and the Persistence of Rights Talk: A Cultural Portrait

The following two themes emerge in an investigation of legal culture in the United States: (1) a denigration of rights and yet (2) a persistent notion that rights are important and should be salvaged. The discourse of rights continues to act as an important frame of reference throughout legal culture. The open-ended nature of rights discourse plus the powerful cultural resonance of rights encourage the use of rights talk to frame issues even when the framers are severely critical of the use of rights. Even if many people agree, however, there are reasons to assess this consensus negatively.