LGBT PARENTS OF COLOR RAISING CHILDREN ARE CONFRONTED BY A DUAL BURDEN OF SOCIAL STIGMA AND DISCRIMINATION.  DISCUSS THIS ISSUE of STEROTYPES and DISCRIMINATION

1) THESIS STATEMENT

2) USE SPECIFIC EXAMPLES TO SUPPORT THE ISSUE OF   STEROTYPES AND DISCRIMINATION

1. Thesis statement: Intersectionality of bigotry, sexism and racism makes it especially challenging for LGBT parents to raise their children
2. Despite a range of options for family structures, LGBT families still face legal challenges to parenting. Legal rights pertaining to adoption and parental rights vary significantly across the United States, as do parents' understandings of and interactions with the law. In fact, parents' expectations of what family formation means are often shaped by the legal context in which they live. For instance, if adoption is not an option for the second parent, it may become less important to the parents' perception of how a family should look.  a family that chooses to identify itself openly as a gay or lesbian parented family may expose itself to risks of homophobic insults, to loss of support from extended family, to loss of jobs or housing, and even to violence. For many families, openness about a parent's homosexual orientation might also result in loss of custody or visitation with the child. Whether or not these dangers are real for a given family, the expectation that they could happen creates considerable anxiety. These are frightening prospects and require very difficult decisions.

Gay and lesbian parented families in hiding about who they are can be presumed to be everywhere. They may look like heterosexual nuclear families, with no one outside the family knowing that one or both parents is gay. More often, one sees what looks like a single mother, perhaps. The fact that she has a committed life partnership may be hidden from everyone in her life: her employer, her community, and even her child. I have seen committed long term couples where the mother's partner is known to all only as a friend. They never live together, never show affection openly, never appear together at social functions, have no interaction with each other's extended families, and expect to continue to live that way until the child is grown. Not only are they themselves under phenomenal stress having to deny so many personal needs, but the child is deprived of the knowledge that his mother is in a loving partnership, and is deprived of another adult parent who could be caring for him.

Whether or not a family is open about being headed by gay or lesbian parents, however, the lack of legal recognition for a nonbiological parent has a profound impact both on internal family dynamics and on the way the family is integrated into their community and extended families. The anxiety may be enormous for a parent who invests his heart and soul in a child with the ever present danger that this child could be taken from him in an instant if the legal parent died. Grandparents may not want to get deeply involved with a child to whom they have no legal ties. Employers may not offer family leave or recognize family emergencies. Insurance will not cover the child of a nonlegal parent.

The situation is especially serious when a gay or lesbian couple with children separates. Their lack of legal recognition as a family creates real danger that the custody and access arrangements that are made will not be in the child's best interests. The biological mother, for example, in a crisis of anger and hurt, may resort to legal privilege and view the child as solely hers, thereby ignoring the child's need for emotional continuity with his other mother. Family and friends, who are understandably protective of her and feel adversarial to her partner, may pressure her to redefine the family relationships along heterosexist lines. Meanwhile, a nonbiological mother knows that she has virtually no chance of succeeding in a court challenge, and so may just get pushed out of the child's life. The professionals who get involved at this juncture have tremendous power to either exacerbate the problem, or to turn it around and support the family to continue coparenting together after separating, despite a complete lack of legal and societal support for doing so.