The best advice anyone could give a dad preparing for a custody battle is to become as active as possible in the lives of your children and to document everything.

or

Feuding Couples Use Spy Gadgets to Snoop

And it’s just another day.

The Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families aims to investigate the physical, mental and social wellbeing of 750 children belonging to about 500 parents. It will involve surveys and interviews to score the children on a large range of measures.

Lead researcher from Melbourne University, Dr Simon Crouch, said although there were likely to be thousands of children with same-sex attracted parents in Australia, very few local studies had ever looked at whether their family circumstances affected their wellbeing and when they had, they were small. Furthermore, he said most studies of such children had been done in northern European countries and the US and they tended to focus on children of lesbian mothers at the expense of those belonging to gay men, bisexuals and transgender people.

They’re asking people to volunteer for the study.

Sperm donors are no more likely to carry genetic diseases than anybody else, but they can father a far greater number of children: 50, 100 or even 150, each a potential inheritor of flawed genes, and each a vector for making those genes more pervasive in the general population.

Even as men have made great strides as fathers, however, they can find themselves rudderless as spouses. “We’re getting a new cultural script for a ‘new dad’ but not for a ‘new husband,’ ” says W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the University of Virginia’s National Marriage Project. “That married people with children now often refer to themselves as a ‘stay-at-home mom’ or ‘stay-at-home dad’ instead of as ‘wife’ or ‘husband’ signals that we now prioritize parenthood over marriage itself.”

For more, see State of Our Unions 2011, When Baby Makes Three: How Parenthood Makes Life Meaningful and Marriage Makes Parenthood Bearable.

…In 2010 for the first time, married mothers were more likely to be employed than single mothers. That trend became more pronounced in 2011. Last year, 63.4% of mothers living alone had a job, compared to 64.6% of married mothers. That was largely because single moms are having a much harder time finding employment. Their unemployment rate was 15% in 2011, compared to 6% for their married counterparts living with a spouse.

…Part of that reason for the disparity is demographic differences. Single mothers are more likely to be minorities or have lower levels of education than their married counterparts. Women with just a high school diploma had an 8.7% unemployment rate in 2011, compared to 4.3% for college graduates. Meanwhile, black women had an 11.9% jobless rate, while white women’s rate was 6.5%.

Today’s “stay at home mom” becomes next year’s “working mother” and vice versa.  To put it a little differently, the mommy wars are over, but not because one  side won. It’s because women keep moving between the mythical enemy camps.

…Although polls show that married women favor Romney over Obama, unmarried women are the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans. They constituted a whopping 71-to-29 percent majority for Obama in 2008, earning them a place in what Democrats call their “rising American electorate”  — the people of color, the young and the unmarried women who helped deliver the presidency for Obama in 2008, and who Democrats desperately want back in 2012.

The problem is, the rising American electorate is a reliable Democratic vote only when it bothers to register and show up. And even though they show a current 44-point preference for Obama, unmarried women — especially those with children — register and vote at lower rates than married women.

The turnout of unmarried women is so unreliable that, until the 2000 presidential election, Democrats generally wrote off the single female vote as not worth the effort. But in that razor-thin contest, strategists noticed for the first time that 22 million members of their most reliable cohort of voters did not go to the polls. If single women had cast ballots in the same proportions as married women, Al Gore probably would have received the punched chads of an additional 6 million voters, more than enough to have won him the White House…

“… the 38-year-old Kansas native is as shocked as anyone with her newfound role—as a gay Christian artist urging fellow Christians to affirm homosexuals.  And she finds herself singing and making her case in the most unlikely venues: churches. Though she no longer fits neatly into the “Christian music” category, Knapp once again sings regularly for congregations and youth groups, the kind of audiences that made her a contemporary, Christian music sensation almost two decades ago.  Those listeners who used to treat her like “a big rock star” now approach her after a concert for counsel about their sexual orientation, she said.”  Read more…

Her journey as a Christian resonated with my own in terms of how to enact change within a faith community.  I am liberal theologically and otherwise and believe that change happens most effectively through knowledge, engaged conversation (that includes prayerful conversation with God), and relationship.  Holding those values closely allows for a level of diversity within community that affirms that we share unity in essentials and diversity in non-essentials. (a loose quote of Melanchton’s 15th Century dictum)

I have followed the conversations here about Christians and homosexuality and I will say that I am a Christian Pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who worked very hard in the years leading up to the our church’s national vote in 2009 that opened the ordained ministry to gay and lesbian pastors in committed relationships (pastors who are gay and lesbian were able to be ordained clergy prior to this vote but they were required to be chaste as all unmarried clergy in the ELCA are).  Note that the resolution did not say “marriage” but as a pastor, I don’t really know how else we would ritually honor and recognize a committed relationship, so in my mind and in all the discussions leading up to that vote, marriage, sexuality, our bodies, etc. were always included.  For two years prior to the vote I served on a Task Force on Human Sexuality for our very rural Midwestern synod that committed to leading and supporting conversations about human sexuality (both parts of the Journey Together Faithfully study can be downloaded for free).  Fun, huh?  For two years (!) I led a weekly Sunday School class (which was highly attended, I might add—a miracle in itself) that discussed a study published by the ELCA on sexuality in general, heterosexuality, homosexuality, transgendered individuals and human relationships in general.  We met in the sanctuary, which I purposely chose to do in order to hold our discussions in a space we set aside as holy.  Also, from the very beginning I made clear that in our discussions I would be gay.  Now, when I say that, please know that I did not presume to know what is it like to be gay and I did not try to import any content to that identity.  However, many folks in the class did not know that members of our church and of our class were gay.  I was grateful that those individuals had they felt safe to share this information with me privately and I assured them that if and when they would want to be public they would have my support.  However, at that point in time being publically gay in our community was not necessarily a safe thing to be.  I announced every class the reminder that “I am gay,” so that when people said really hurtful and small-minded things, I could say, “OUCH.  That hurts me.”  Many folks did not even realize that some of things that they thought or said were hurtful.  Let me first say, I love these people, but many of them said really hurtful, judgmental things out of fear, and there was a lot of fear.  Growing up in a ballet company and in the theater, I never knew that fear because I never knew life without gay individuals, and I quickly learned that I was a minority.

Throughout that time I met with people in groups and I met with several people one on one, and we talked and talked and talked.  And the goal of the time was not to strong arm anyone, but to remind ourselves that God creates and gifts all people, and that when we do not understand why something is or how something works or we disagree with our brothers and sisters, we stay in relationship; we are not allowed to close our hearts and minds to anyone.  We never stop seeking to understand.  I was proud and deeply thankful that despite several years of turmoil, we became a more open place that did not leave the ELCA when they voted to honor homosexuals in committed relationships when many, many congregations left.

As a heterosexual, Christian leader the role I think I can play is to step into the fray and say OUCH on behalf of my homosexual brothers and sisters, which often is a place that if I were homosexual is not a safe place to be.  I would not ask anyone to step into a place where they would potentially be abused or hurt, but I can go there and hold on fiercely to those folks and know that only committed relationship and deep, abiding conversation and challenge can truly open minds and hearts.

That’s why I keep writing here because the abiding philosophy on marriage, family, thrift, aging, death and so on is simple: Keep talking.