Why a Nebraska father in a same-sex marriage must fight for rights over his daughter (fixed)

[Omaha Steve]

X post in GD



Nickolas Kramer (left) and husband, Jason Cadek, pose with their 3-year-old daughter, Alice.

http://www.omaha.com/momaha/blogs/why-a-nebraska-father-in-a-same-sex-marriage-must/article_dd60affa-b92c-11e4-a572-cf105548505d.html

POSTED: MONDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 2015 1:45 AM
By Nickolas Kramer / momaha guest blogger

After eight years together, my husband and I decided it was finally time to expand our family. We knew instantly that our first child would be adopted as my family has a long history of adoption and I wanted to carry on that tradition.

In December of 2010, I did all of the research and discovered that the first step is an extensive home study. For those who don’t know, a home study is an intrusive process where a social worker takes a deep dive into your life, researching your finances, health, family history and the amount of toilet paper you use – OK that’s a stretch. The point is that the home study is just slightly less invasive than a colonoscopy.

We started our home study in late January of 2011 and completed it in a record 4 months – really that is fast. We then needed to find an adoption agency we liked. We found a great one in Des Moines, Iowa. In May, we drove from our Omaha home to Des Moines to visit the agency and begin the process. They warned us that being matched with a birth mother can take months if not years. So we braced ourselves and headed home.

Long story short, we received a call within two weeks. We had been matched and our baby would be born in September. Yikes! Our heads began to swim with all of the questions of normal expecting parents: What to buy for a baby, what color to paint the nursery and what names we like.

FULL story at link.

[Marrah_G]

1. The link isn't showing for me

Where was the story from?

[Omaha Steve]

2. Fixed

Two posts in a row I screwed up the link.

Thanks.

OS

[Marrah_G]

3. Thank you!!!!!

[stone space]

4. Hello from Ames!

This isn't the first a couple has had to cross the border from Nebraska to Iowa for purposes of marriage.

It's an Iowa tradition going way back.

Iowa’s Family Values

By STEVEN W. THRASHER

Published: April 8, 2009

IF it weren’t for Iowa, my family may never have existed, and this gay, biracial New Yorker might never have been born.

In 1958, when my mother, who was white, and father, who was black, wanted to get married in Nebraska, it was illegal for them to wed. So they decided to go next door to Iowa, a state that was progressive enough to allow interracial marriage. My mom’s brother tried to have the Nebraska state police bar her from leaving the state so she couldn’t marry my dad, which was only the latest legal indignity she had endured. She had been arrested on my parents’ first date, accused of prostitution. (The conventional thought of the time being: Why else would a white woman be seen with a black man?)

On their wedding day, somehow, my parents made it out of Nebraska without getting arrested again, and were wed in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on March 1, 1958. This was five years before Nebraska would strike down its laws against interracial marriage, and almost a decade before the Supreme Court would outlaw miscegenation laws throughout the country in Loving v. Virginia.

When the good state of Iowa conferred the dignity of civic recognition on my parents’ relationship — a relationship some members of their own families thought was deviant and immoral, that the civil authorities of Nebraska had tried to destroy, and that even some of my mom’s college-educated friends believed would produce children striped like zebras — our family began. And by the time my father died, their interracial marriage was seen just as a marriage, and an admirable 45-year one at that.

snip-------------------

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09thrasher.html