Katie has two mothers

My friend Sara Miles has an opinion piece on Salon reacting to the NY court decision on gay marriage. Describing a scene in which she, her spouse Martha and their daughter Katie have breakfast:

Just by hanging out in our kitchen, the three of us challenge what Smith called the "accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex." By asking for the legal benefits of marriage, we threaten the already unstable institution of the heterosexual family...

Our daughter, like all children, deserves what Judge Smith recognized as "an important function of marriage" -- to "create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born." She also deserves the legal benefits and protections afforded to the kids of heterosexual parents -- even unmarried heterosexual parents. (In 1968, the Supreme Court swept away many of the harsher provisions of common law governing illegitimacy, ruling on equal protection grounds.) She deserves to have Martha recognized as her mother.

Sara wrote about her pregnancy during the El Salvador civil war, where she was working as a journalist, for the magazine God's Friends. Her memoir Take This Bread will be out early next year.

gay marriage, Sara Miles