On Adoption

Last year I mentioned that of all the heartbreaking anti-gay election defeats in California, Florida, and Arizona, it was the anti-adoption measure in Arkansas that I found the most worrisome. With the stated goal of preventing gay and lesbian couples from adopting, the Arkansas Family Council wrote the measure broadly enough to ban even straight unmarried couples and single individuals from adopting.

It's important to point out to these social conservatives that gay and lesbian couples can and do have children the old-fashioned way. Mary Cheney, for instance, has recently confirmed she is pregnant with her second child. There is no law that they can pass to stop this. This measure doesn't thwart gay couples from starting families; it just takes away the option of adoption. So the only victims of their vindictive measure are the kids in foster care hoping to find homes.

This measure got less notice than California's Proposition 8, and I wished it had gotten more attention. That's why I was heartened when I read this interview with Scott Fujita, the NFL linebacker for the New Orleans Saints, where he talks about this measure and how it bothered him as an adopted child.

"what that is really saying is that the concern with one's sexual orientation or one's sexual preference outweighs what's really important, and that's finding safe homes for children, for our children. It's also saying that we'd rather have kids bounce around from foster home to foster home throughout the course of their childhood, than end up in a permanent home, where the parent, whether that person's single or not, gay or straight. Either way, it doesn't matter. It's a home that's going to be provided for a kid who desperately needs a home."

I just wish more people were saying things like this before the election.