{"id":16112,"date":"2016-03-13T20:53:13","date_gmt":"2016-03-13T20:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.golive.clarku.edu\/news\/2016\/03\/13\/clark-professor-explores-parents-relationships-to-gay-in-laws\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T05:45:17","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T09:45:17","slug":"clark-professor-explores-parents-relationships-to-gay-in-laws","status":"publish","type":"story","link":"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2016\/03\/13\/clark-professor-explores-parents-relationships-to-gay-in-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"Clark professor explores parents&#8217; relationships to gay in-laws"},"content":{"rendered":"<html><body>\r\n\r\nA woman who is gay lives about an hour away from her mother. Yet she only visits her mother every seven years. The mother never mentions her daughters wife, whom she has never acknowledged as her daughter-in-law. There are no holiday gifts for the wife, and the mother never asks about their adopted child. Yet, the woman still feels obligated to make those distressing visits to her mother. Although this extreme a reaction is not typical of parents of gay married children, Deborah M. Merrill, a sociology professor at Clark University, says most of them have initial difficulties when told about upcoming nuptials. (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegram.com\/article\/20160313\/ENTERTAINMENTLIFE\/160319719\/101399\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Worcester Telegram &amp; Gazette<\/a>, March 13, 2016)\r\n<div class=\"external-link\">Source:&nbsp;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.telegram.com\/article\/20160313\/ENTERTAINMENTLIFE\/160319719\/101399\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Clark professor explores parents&#8217; relationships to gay in-laws<\/a><\/div><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A woman who is gay lives about an hour away from her mother. Yet she only visits her mother every seven years. The mother never mentions her daughters wife, whom she has never acknowledged as her daughter-in-law. There are no holiday gifts for the wife, and the mother never asks about their adopted child. Yet, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":16113,"template":"","meta":{"story_color":"#525250","story_headerImg":16113,"section_label":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[441],"displayed_author":[324],"featured":[],"topic":[],"class_list":["post-16112","story","type-story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blogs","displayed_author-clark-news-and-media-relations"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.4 (Yoast SEO v27.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Clark professor explores parents&#8217; relationships to gay in-laws | ClarkU News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clarku.edu\/news\/2016\/03\/13\/clark-professor-explores-parents-relationships-to-gay-in-laws\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Clark professor explores parents&#8217; relationships to gay in-laws\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A woman who is gay lives about an hour away from her mother. Yet she only visits her mother every seven years. The mother never mentions her daughters wife, whom she has never acknowledged as her daughter-in-law. There are no holiday gifts for the wife, and the mother never asks about their adopted child. 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