It’s official: It costs more to be a gay or lesbian family than it costs to be a heterosexual family.

For most of the LGBT community, this is not exactly a news flash. In fact, it comes close to the “studies say drunk driving causes motor vehicle accidents” or “studies say losing weight requires exercising more and eating less” school of research.

Even so, mainstream media validation of our experiences is nice.

And it doesn’t get much more official or mainstream than the New York Times. And on Friday, the NYT Money folks wrote a thoroughly researched article concluding that for middle/upper-middle class families with 2 children, the out of pocket costs of being a lesbian family (yes, they used lesbians as their example!) is between $41k-$467k greater than those of a similarly situated married heterosexual family.

That’s right. An lesbian couple who are exceptionally financially unlucky could spend almost half a million dollars more, between ages 35-85, than a similarly situated heterosexual couple.

Details on the assumptions used by the reporters, and how those variables might change, are also provided by the NYT Money reporters.

Many of us have reported less exhaustive, more back-of-the-napkin estimates on the costs too. I wrote one about the cost of fertility treatment, and another on the tax impact being a lesbian family had on me in 2006.

Now, it is true that every dollar in that $41-467k would not instantly disappear if same sex marriage were recognized by every state and the federal government. The fertility treatment costs are independent of marriage. But legal recognition of our marriages would make a HUGE difference towards equalizing our financial footing.

Incidentally, I’m not anti-tax. I want to be clear about that. I think paying our fair share of taxes is a critical aspect of living in a democracy. I want to pay my fair share towards schools and roads and public safety and elections and national security and research and health care and the myriad of other services the government does and should provide.

The key word here is fair. Similarly situated families should pay similar taxes. My family shouldn’t have to pay almost half a million dollars more in lifetime taxes than, for example, my sister’s family.

Hi Lesbian Families and Friends of the Family!

What do you think of the idea of a monthly LesbianFamily.org email newsletter? We wouldn’t want to spam you, but we’re also looking at ways we might be able to generate more community within our community.

A newsletter would give us another way to highlight newly listed blogs, show off bloggers and photos we love, list activities of interest, and offer the possibility for things like classified ads or essays/posts/poetry from those of you with something to say who aren’t able to make the committment to be full blown contributing editors or authors.

Is there anything else you’d want to see in a newsletter? Or really NOT want to see?

If we do a newsletter, what we would probably do is spam all of you whose email addresses we have ONCE, with a clear opt-in for future newsletters. Unless you have another idea for how we might reach you. We’re open to ideas!

Our gals from Hydrangeas Are Pretty, Shelli and Narda, got official in Connecticut, with mega-adorable Noah Matan getting a ringside seat. Malka is reclining on the step behind them. You know, with slight changes in the scenery, this is pretty much exactly like what unfolded for my beloved and me on the other side of the country (geographically and politically speaking) last July. Little boy child in arms, girl child blazé on the steps behind.  

Much love and hearty congratulations to an old couple knee-deep in kids. 

New additions and updates await posting here at LesbianFamily, and they’ll be forthcoming soon.  Thanks for stopping by.

[Photo by Christopher Gannon, AP, in The Columbia Missourian.]

Above: Dawn BarbouRoske, second from left, of Iowa City leans towards her partner, Jen BarbouRoske, after learning of the Iowa Supreme Court ruling Friday in favor of legalizing gay marriage. Between them is their daughter Bre, 6. Their other daughter, 11-year-old McKinley, left, reacts to the ruling.

We extend our hearty congratulations to lesbian families in Iowa, who as of yesterday began to be able to receive the myriad legal protections afforded by state-recognized partnership.

In LesbianFamily.org news, we have two new additions and a transition:

• Geek and Lawyer, who live and write in Australia, joins the TTC listings, 
• adventures in making a baby has joined the Expecting listings, and
• Creating a Miracle moved from TTC to Expecting

Welcome, yay, and congratulations!

Two more blogs are on deck (also an addition and a transition), and as soon as we can find out what the URLs are, we’ll announce them here.  This makes for as good a time as any to remind you to include your URL in a comment when you’re letting us know you want to be listed or shifted.  :)

Over the past several weeks, a wonderful handful of folks have written in and offered to help tend the LesFam field here.  Next week I hope to run a welcome post, and will invite the new folks to introduce themselves (and the returning old folks to re-introduce and update us). ‘Til then, we raise a sippy cup to you, Iowa!

First off, what’s BlogHer? BlogHer is an online community of and for women who blog, and BlogHer, as a thing you might “go to,” is their bodacious annual conference.

From their About page,

 BlogHer’s mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today BlogHer provides the number-one community for and guide to blogs by women, reaching more than 14 million women each month via annual conferences, a Web hub (http://www.blogher.com), and an publishing network of more than 2,700 qualified, contextually targeted blog affiliates (http://blogherads.com).

BlogHer puts on regional conferences as well as a big national one, meant to enable women online to connect to one another, share expertise, ideas, network, and basically whoop it up a lot.

I went  last year in San Francisco, and I know LesbianFamily.org founder Liza spoke at the 2007 conference in Chicago and attended last year’s regional conference in Atlanta.  As Liza and others can attest, they are doing really impressive coalition-building across difference, and have made consistent overtures to search out and provide platforms for lesbian, lesbian mom, and women of color bloggers (lesbian/mom or otherwise).  They are good people.

So this year BlogHer’s national conference will be back in Chicago (sold out already, apparently; here’s the waitlist), and at least two of us from the LesbianFamily.org group (Liza and I) will be there.  Will you be there? Want to meet up over brunch after the conference? Yay!  

I only have Yelp! to go by, but the West Egg Cafe looks good, and is just a few blocks north of the hotel where the conference is taking place. I figure folks with neighborhood know-how can weigh in, and we can chit-chat in the comments here to fine-tune plans.

UPDATE: WE’RE GONNA MEET AT THE WEST EGG CAFE @ 9AM SUNDAY MORNING, GALS!

And even if you’re not going but want to help spread the word to folks who might, would you consider pasting the above button in your sidebar or in a post?  [FYI: It's 150px wide & 200 px tall.]

<a title=”lesfammeetupblogher09″ href=”http://lesbianfamily.org/2009/03/24/going-to-blogher-lets-meet-up/”> <img src=”http://lesbianfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/lesfammeetupblogher09.jpg” alt=”lesfammeetupblogher09″ width=”150″height=”200″/></a>

[Note: if the link gets wonky on you, you might have to fix the infernal "curly" quotation marks in the HTML, typing in your own "  " marks instead. I've tried to fix them here in the post & am stumped. Apologies.]

And by “web,” I don’t mean the world wide kind. More like the spider kind. This second batch of phenomenally late updates has only been in the queue since mid -October! Only four and a half months! The other ones, well. Picture the inside of Miss Haversham’s house, from Great Expectations. That’s what the LesbianFamily.org comments mediation queue looked like. Dust over everything, spider webs everywhere, plates of unfinished food, totally crumbly and mouldy, the clock frozen in time, somewhere about early summer last year, when everything began to get just a little bit hairy. But all’s better now, eh what? Or at least, we’ve taken a shop-vac to the inside of the place.

The remaining installment of the updateage brings us all — stagger stagger, pant pant pant — up to the minute with all the lesbian family bloggery! Over fifty new listings in all, with a handful of old ones moving from one page to another.

To celebrate, I’ve added a link in the sidebar (no there — down a little further… yep!) speeding you all to the LesbianFamily.org swag repository at Café Press, which has been there for EONS, since Liza set it up. I’m hoping that perhaps with a handy-dandy sidebar link, these fine products will now have the attention they deserve, and will soon be winging their way into lesbian baby showers world-wide. Since it’s me doing this promo, I’m using the trucker hat to demo the logo in action. But yes, ladies, there are baby-doll tees. And tote bags, and onsies, and the works. Expect more such shameless promos around major holidays in the future.

Also in the future, we’re hoping to spruce the under-the-hood part of the site up a bit more with an updated WordPress template, which will greatly facilitate a few long-awaited upkeep projects, such as the alphabetizing of the listings (altogether too onerous in the pure HTML environment currently available to our admin panel). We’ll also settle back into regular postings from the wonderful LesbianFamily.org Flickr album. Please write with suggestions of things you’d like to see here, in the way of new listings categories, or other resource features. And likewise, let us know if you want your blog to be shuffled from one page to the next.

A heart-felt thanks to all of you who’ve waited so long to see your blogs listed here. Thank you for writing about your family and family-making journeys. You all, together, help to make our community that much bigger and richer. And the better the community, the better things are for our kids (or kid-conjuring).

Most recently listed in TTC, allow me to please introduce:

• baby toes
• Bang head here…
• A Tale of 2 Future Mommies
• Baby Mamas
• Two Moms with a Plan
• Our Journey to Motherhood
• Girls Seeking Gabber
• The Sock Drawer
• Dear Baby….Love Mama
• …two wives and a boarder marker…
• A Story of Two Moms
• Growing up Clangley
• love is love
• Two girls in love….

Most recently listed in Expecting, please mosey on by:

• Mommy and Mamita
• Two Girls Trying For A Baby
• An Offering of Love
• Craving of Motherhood
• An Accident of Hope
• Two Girls Trying For A Baby
• First Time Second Time
• Mesdames plus baby
• For the Long Haul
• 1 In Vermillion
• Darwin has 2 Mommies

We have us some fresh Babies, check ‘em out here:

• Enough Grows
• The Commune Child
• May the Beauty…
• Irreverent Mother
• Journey To Om

A few Little Kids blogs have also joined the LesFam fray:

• First Time Second Time
• Peaches & Coconuts

One of the above blogs is cross-listed under Non-bio:

• First Time Second Time

And several of the newly listed blogs are cross-listed under Single Parenting, a recently established page, along with Families of Color which I hope we’ll see a lot more blogs get listed on.

• The Sock Drawer
• Ocean Dreamer
• For the Long Haul

Okay, now! Of you go, to pay these gals a visit!

Alrighty then! The update that most of you have been waiting for, so long you stopped waiting! So huge, it had to be divided into two parts! Part the 2nd to follow in a few more days, after I plow through the second half of backlogged listings requests.

Since June of last year, comment moderation here at LesbianFamily.org has more or less gone into the deep freeze. For partial explanation, you may refer to the most recent post I did, Boo! At least that goes a ways toward trying to explain my own LesFam lethargy. That plus ye olde Parenting, which is a fairly time-consuming activity. The other LesFam administrators have been juggling new kids in their families, and/or work, and/or any of the other life issues that so often rear their heads.

This batch of folks have been waiting since October last year and before (!). Some are cross-listed, as you’ll notice. The next post will include folks who’ve waited to be listed since around mid-October (!).

Among the TTC folk, we have:

• Married and Ready to Make Babies
• Two Moms To Be…
• 2 Girls 2 Dogs 2 Cats…
• eeney meeney miney mommy
• ISO: Baby

We also have a crop of Expecting blogs:

• Luca Has 2 Mommies
• in the wilderness
• existere (latin): to stand out, to emerge.
• BabyBoom 2 Futuras Mamis Lesbianas.

Several new Babies! blogs:

• Luca Has 2 Mommies
• Mommy J’s Wild Ride

And Kids, both Little and Big:

• Emerging Butterfly
• A mom’s struggle with identity
• Luca Has 2 Mommies
• Come What May
• A mom’s struggle with identity

Among the various pages listing families by type, we have new listings in:

Familia Lesbiana

• BabyBoom 2 Futuras Mamis Lesbianas.

Families of Color

• Seriously Involved

Foster

• Sweetest of Things
• Wishinghopingpraying’s weblog

Interracial Families

• Come What May

Multiples

• Come What May

And Single Parenting

• Sweetest of Things

You’ll notice that we’ve added a few categories under which you can list or cross-list your blogs. In the “Parenting by type” section, we’ve added “Single parenting” and “Families of color.” The site sprang up in August 2006, thanks to Liza taking the initiative and creating the resource she knew lesbian parents needed to find one anothers’ blogs online. But the parsing and sorting of the blogs has always (a) been voluntary, on the part of folks’ requesting listings, and (b) intended to evolve as you readers suggest more useful ways to look for and find one another.

The “Single parenting” comes from several new blogs by women single parenting, either by choice or by — whatever it is when it’s not choice. I added the “Families of color” category since, after multiple sessions wading deep into the site’s categories and cross-listings, it dawned on me that, duh: we have “Global” and “Interracial” families, but no place for women of color either single parenting or parenting with another woman of color to cross list. (!!) So (a) you may kick my ignorant, slow-on-the-uptake white arse, riiiiiight here. And (b) you may help spread the word among friends who might make good use of the listing.

Now! If enough of you (how many? who knows: ’spose we’ll know when we hear back) have objections to “of color,” and propose an alternative that works better, great! I’m a white gal whose coming of age as a thinking anti-racist person happened in California in the 1980s, essentially. For us out here, “people of color” was and still is a self-empowering term for people of African, Asian, Latin, and Native American heritage who wish, for purposes of political solidarity in any given instance, to refer to themselves as a group.

I just make this note because once, in a comment on some online article somewhere, someone objected to the term, finding it aligned with the archaic “colored,” from my father’s generation. Though for that matter, that term has different connotations for people in the UK and abroad than it does here in the US.

And finally! In an attempt to stem the relentless tide of spammy comments, I purged our “users” list of hundreds upon hundreds of what I thought to be bogus addresses. For my own blog, I always double check each one that seems to potentially be valid. But we had so very many, I just went with my gut. So! If your email address or user name had anything remotely to do with Viagra, or pharmacies, or businesses of many kinds, or emanated from Russia (sorry, but <.ru> is the locus of like 50% of all spammerosity, it seems), or had funny gobbilty-gookish words for your username, or had a funky email address that didn’t make sense relative to the gobbilty-gookish name, or, finally, just looked funny to my bleary eyes as my toddler sucked on my pinkie and we listened to Toddler Songs, for the gazillionth time: sorry, but you’ve been given the heave-ho! Please just sign up again.

Ahoy, and apologies!  An egregious gap has yawned between the last update and this one, explained only by the same old same old: too many kidcare duties, not enough time to spread around.  Which lament many of you either know first-hand, or are working hard so’s to know before too long.

A bunch of new listings have been queueing up since mid-June. In a LesFam first, three TTC blogs dropped off the radar in the month it took me to get around to posting them here.  Two others, alas, asked to be listed and didn’t include their URLs; I hope to be able to list them soon, once I track them down.

Per recent trends here at LesFam, nealy half the new listings this month are TTC (or Trying To Conceive) blogs.  They’re joined by a good smattering of blogs from parents of older kids. 

Among the TTC folk, we have:

• Patiently Awaiting Hope: Gia is “Taking this journey on faith and where every step brings ‘Hope’”
• Twin Cycles: the account of Kia’s TTC journey alongside her sweetie Gia — yes, that Gia, of Patiently Awaiting Hope
• two older hippos wanting a baby hippo: a 38 year old trying to conceive her first child with the love of her life
• Wishinghopingpraying: “just your average nice, Jewish lesbians TTC baby #1.  ‘Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see’ Hebrews 1:1″

At 2 moms and a pregnancy, MT is chronicling her pregnancy with her partner of six years.  

The author of Luca Has 2 Mommies is both pregnant with twins and raising a toddler.  (Yow!)  

Emerging Butterfly is chronicling “One Woman’s Journey From Insecure Heterosexual Houswife to Confident Lesbian Mother.”

In Sweetest of Things, mtnhighmama, a single quee mama, foster mom, and surrogate mom, writes as about the good life in the Pacific Northwest.

At Come What May, Tyffany writes of her life in Colorado, her 13 year-old interracial relationship, and her 10 year-old twins.

And finally, Kat, at a mom’s struggle with identity, writes of her coming out process, after five kids: “this blog is about me, my identity, my visibility, my concerns and questions and random thoughts that make no sense. I hope it grows into a blog that explores a new love, a new relationship and the ups and downs that brings along with it.”
Welcome, all you gals!  LesFam readers, go visit them and tell ‘em we (finally!) sent you!  The blogs will show up in their various lists over the next couple of days.

Ha! Thought we’d all wandered off for good, huh? Well pert’ near. Pride month is one thing; I can imagine taking that one off, like the French take August. In a belated nod to that celebration, we have the image at right: “Party A” and “Party B” at San Francisco’s Pride celebration practically a month ago. (”Party A” and “Party B” have replaced “bride” and “groom” on marriage licenses as of June 17.)

But July turned out to be busier than expected around our household. On the short end of the stick: an accumulation of folks wanting to be added to the ever-growing LesFam rolls. Because the neglect is weighing heavily upon me, I’ve had to at least post this wee note pledging that before we see get a full week into August, a fresh update will be appear here. We have over nearly a dozen new folks, whom I can’t wait to introduce you to. So long as they’re still lesbians, and still in or trying to get in the family way. A lot can happen in a month or two.

Dana over at Mombian is running her fabulous queer family fun-fest for the third year in a row today. Go check out the list of contributed posts, which will be added to on a rolling basis throughout the day. A great many of the Lesbian Family-listed blogs have posted something on the occasion. Here’s mine, for fun. And Liza, LesbianFamily.org founder, posted this.

If you’ve listed your blog here, and would like readers to see your Blogging for LGBT Families Day post, do let us know in the comments below!