Missouri City Ordinance Targets Nontraditional Families
Friday April 14, 2006
Category: Gender and Sexuality
Feministing has called my attention to a March 2006 story about a really creepy and overbearing city ordinance which, ostensibly in the name of preventing "overcrowding," restricts the lives of lesbian and gay couples, and unmarried heterosexual couples, and monks and nuns, and any real-life parallels to the characters on Friends and Golden Girls, and...:
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Feministing has called my attention to a March 2006 story about a really creepy and overbearing city ordinance which, ostensibly in the name of preventing "overcrowding," restricts the lives of lesbian and gay couples, and unmarried heterosexual couples, and monks and nuns, and any real-life parallels to the characters on Friends and Golden Girls, and...:
On Tuesday night, the [Black Jack, Missouri] City Council directed the city's planning and zoning commission to review the ordinance forbidding more than three people from living together unless they are related by "blood, marriage or adoption."The great new LGBT feminist blog Midnight Bridges cuts right to the heart of the matter:
Black Jack's definition of "family" has come under fire because it has been used against unmarried parents with more than one child.
On the basis of the ordinance's definition of a family, the city denied an occupancy permit to Olivia Shelltrack and her fiance, Fondray Loving. The couple moved into their five-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot home last month with their three children, and they remain there. Shelltrack is the mother of all three children, and Loving is the biological father of two. But city officials have repeatedly ruled that the household fails to meet Black Jack's definition of family.
The oppressions faced by queer people, the poor and the working poor, and people of color are not the same, and I don't want to minimize that -- but the ways in which we are oppressed have some similarities. Most of these circle around ideas of (re)productivity. This spins out to being about controlling our labor, our sexuality, and our domestic space. Anxieties about these three things have been warping the lives of people on the margin for the last ... long f-ing time. This is another example of that ...It would be really nice if municipal governments focused more on things like affordable safe housing, and less on meddling in the lives of healthy families.
I do think that communities and the government should support the families as they exist, nurturing those organic networks of love and obligation that we make with each other. This should mean that there are supports for two single mothers who want to share a household and benefit from all the things that are good about having two adults in a home. It should support families that are multi-generational, "female-headed", and queer in a whole host of other ways. And affordable housing in safe neighborhoods, I think that should be a given.
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Please change the headline and note that this ordinance is not in St. Louis, Missouri, but in Black Jack, Missouri. St. Louis City has an extremely GLBT-friendly government and population with domestic partner legislation that is many years on the books. Don’t blame St. Louis for Black Jack, Missouri’s laws.
Ouch. I knew it was Black Jack; I have no idea why I typed St. Louis. Duly corrected, with apologies.
A number of communities seem to have these. When I lived in Carbondale, Illinois, back in the mid-1990s, their city ordinance prevented more than two unrelated people from living together. This was ostensibly done to keep college students out of residential neighborhoods. Big discrimination against single people. Assumes all singles are loud partygoers even though many are quiet and responsible homeowners. Even the ‘Golden Girls’ would not have been allowed in Carbondale.
I also seem to remember an incident in the mid-1990s in the St. Louis metro area in which there was an effort to keep a nun’s group out of a neighborhood based on this ‘unrelated’ stuff. Sounds like the St. Louis area got wise and got rid of this sort of ordinance, though, which is good.