[Quebec, Canada] Eminé Piyalé-Sheard does not have the right to sign off on the report card brought home by the 13-year-old boy she calls her son. She has been bandaging his scraped knees and wiping his tears for 11 years, but if he were to have an emergency relapse of asthma, she would not have the legal right to make a quick decision to authorize medical treatment.
''If I were to die,'' said Ms. Piyalé-Sheard, a 35-year-old corporate vice president, ''and there was no will, there would be nothing automatically left to my son. And if I decided to walk out and go to another country I would have no obligations for child support.'' That is because the boy she calls her son was born to the woman with whom she lives.
But all that is about to change at the end of June, when a new Quebec provincial law goes into effect giving gay and lesbian couples the same full parental rights and obligations extended to heterosexual couples. Pensions, health insurance, tax laws, inheritance and other benefits that pertain to families headed by heterosexuals will now apply to families headed by homosexuals.
Canadian gay rights activists are heralding the June 7 passage of Bill 84 by the Quebec provincial legislature as the most important advance for their cause since the Netherlands granted gay couples the right to marry last year.
With church attendance plummeting, marriage and birth rates declining and abortion becoming more common in recent years, the new gay rights law is another sign that rapid social change continues to sweep a province that two generations ago was largely directed by the Roman Catholic Church.
The new law gives gays and lesbians equal standing with heterosexuals in adopting children. It allows two men or two women to appear as equal parents on a birth certificate, an internationally recognized document, which means, among other things, that either adult has the right to travel across borders with the child without the risk of being accused of kidnapping.
The law also grants gay and lesbian couples the same status and duties as married heterosexual couples in a legal relationship that is called ''civil union,'' a quasi marriage already granted in nearby Vermont.
Opinion polls indicate that there is still skepticism in Canada about whether same-sex parentage is good for children. The Catholic bishops and evangelical churches warned that the law would further erode the institution of marriage.
But the three political parties represented in the legislature passed the law unanimously. The fact that the new rights came from the unanimous vote of a democratically elected legislature rather than a court decision has led many gay rights advocates to predict that marriage for gays may become legal soon in Canada.
''Twenty years ago, or even 10 years ago, this would have been impossible to imagine, something close to equality,'' said Bill Ryan, 45, a social work professor at McGill University who is planning to join in a civil union with his partner and then share legal custody of a 16-year-old boy he adopted two years ago. ''We were still fighting over losing our jobs over sexual orientation 10 years ago in some provinces,'' he added.
Six of the 10 provinces of Canada grant some parental rights to same-sex couples, as do many states in the United States. But Quebec will now extend greater parental rights to gay couples than elsewhere in the world, rights advocates here say.
The Quebec legislature did not have the power to grant gays the right to marry, because marriage is under federal jurisdiction. But the new law, the advocates say, is still superior in some ways to the Dutch law, especially for lesbian parents.
In the Netherlands, people who are not the biological parents still face a long and sometimes costly legal process, often accompanied by an evaluation by a government-appointed psychologist, before they can adopt.
In Quebec, however, lesbian parents will be able to avoid the adoption process entirely when one of the women in the union has given birth to the child after artificial insemination from a sperm donor. The names of both members of the civil union will go on the birth certificate, just as in the case of heterosexual parents.
''Gay and lesbian couples will not have illegitimate children any more,'' said Marie-France Bureau, a lawyer specializing in human rights and family law. ''The law sends a clear message to the population that gay and lesbian families are as worthy as other families, and children of these unions deserve all the protections that other children have.''
For Ms. Piyalé-Sheard, her partner, Nathalie Ricard, a 36-year-old nurse, and Ms. Ricard's son, François, everyday life will pretty much go on as always under the new law since their 11-year-old family is already solidly consolidated. Only now, Ms. Piyalé-Sheard will be able to put her name on François' birth certificate without going to court and be legally recognized as his parent. The two women have been going to parent-teacher meetings and teacher conferences together for years, and François has been brought up to treat them as equal parents. At age 3, he indicated that he found it awkward to call both women ''Mom'' so ever since he has called them both by their first names. The three express joy that their family unit will now be sanctioned by the province. ''It's wow!'' said Ms. Ricard. ''It just opens doors where there used to be so much resistance. People will now see that gays have children and families and responsibilities, and that will break down prejudice.''
Looking back, she and Ms. Piyalé-Sheard said there were many times the new law could have been helpful in establishing their claim that their family was as worthy as anybody's. There was the time when they tried to argue with a Catholic Sunday school teacher that François should be allowed to draw two women, rather than a man and a woman, when drawing the picture of a family. Then there was the time, when François was in third grade and harassed by older students for living with two lesbians; the school principal suggested that it was outside his power to do something about such intolerance. ''The principal made it seem like there were no other gay parents,'' Ms. Ricard said. ''Now they will not be able to push our kind of family under the carpet.''
Source: The New York Times
Bravo to American President Obama for acknowledging gay dads during his Father's Day proclamation! He wrote: "Nurturing families come in many forms, and children may be raised by a father and mother, a single father, two fathers, a step father, a grandfather, or caring guardian."
"Legal changes giving same-sex couples on Prince Edward Island all the rights enjoyed by mixed-sex couples were proclaimed over the weekend, ending a wait of more than three years," reports the CBC. Marriage commissioners on Prince Edward Island have been able to perform same-sex marriages since June 2006, but many pieces of provincial legislation still referred to married couples as "man and woman" or "husband and wife." The Domestic Relations Act replaced those words with more gender-neutral terms. While the bill did get royal assent last year, same-sex couples were still waiting for the proclamation to happen. In all, 29 pieces of legislation had to be changed. "I think that a lot of people have been feeling like, yes, OK, they finally allowed gay marriage. And now it's just waiting for the paperwork to be finished," said Alana Leard of the Abegweit Rainbow Collective, but that people were starting to get frustrated. With it taking so long it just didn't seem that was important enough to take priority. But we are definitely excited that is finally going to happen."
Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber have written an excellent article for the New York Times called The higher lifetime costs of being a gay couple. They write: "Much of the debate over legalizing gay marriage has focused on God and Scripture, the Constitution and equal protection. But we see the world through the prism of money. And for years, we’ve heard from gay couples about all the extra health, legal and other costs they bear. So we set out to determine what they were and to come up with a round number — a couple’s lifetime cost of being gay."
