I’ve been thinking lately about the new proposals by State Senator Paul Stanley, R-Germantown, and Rep. John DeBerry, Jr., D-Memphis that would essentially ban gay couples from adopting.  Here’s the wording of Stanley’s proposition (HB0605 is the same): 

“SB0078: Adoption – Prohibits any individual who is cohabitating in a sexual relationship outside of a

marriage that is valid under the constitution and laws of this state from adopting a minor. – Amends

TCA Title 36 and Title 49.”

The summary for SB0078 states that the bill would apply to “cohabitating same-sex and opposite-sex couples”.  Let there be no question about it, however.  This isn’t about Jeff and his live-in girlfriend Cindy, wanting to adopt a couple of kids.  How often does that happen, anyway?  No, Stanley wants to ban Tennessee’s gay couples from adopting.  This is what Stanley said in an interview with OneNewsNow, a website run by American Family News Network: 

“We were having a lot of [unmarried] individuals apply to adopt children from state custody….And while single people can make very good parents, what we were finding is that some of those individuals were in same-sex relationships,” he points out. “And we just thought it was not advantageous to have children who are the responsibility of the state being placed in such homes.”   

Including Cindy and Jeff in the bill is just his way of protecting the bill against a constitutional challenge, such as recently happened in Florida (it only took 30 years, by the way).

So, I’ve been wondering, with 1500 children waiting to be adopted in his district alone, what, exactly, is the advantage of NOT placing them for adoption in same-sex families?  After all, we’re talking about keeping children in the system, where they’ll continue to be warehoused at tax-payer expense, simply because of an ideology that says gays don’t make good parents.  Actually, the ideology says gays don’t make good people, and therefore can’t be trusted with other people’s unwanted children. 

I know.  I make it sound very cold and ugly, don’t I?  Here’s the thing: there isn’t space enough on this series of tubes to change the hearts and minds of people who think of gays and lesbians as second-class citizens, reducing the GLBT community to a series of unsavory sex-acts or one-dimensional images of feathered queens on garish parade floats.  Sure, I could quote the stats, such as this one:

                In “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” a 1992, article in Child Development, Charlotte Patterson states, ”Despite dire predictions about children based on well-known theories of psychosocial development, and despite the accumulation of a substantial body of research investigating these issues, not a single study has found children of gay or lesbian parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.”

I could add that the National Adoption Center, the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics have determined that having gay and lesbian parents does not negatively affect children.  But it wouldn’t help.  Belief in scriptural misinterpretations will trump them all, I’m afraid.  So, while more than a few children risk losing the only parents they’ve ever known, and parents risk losing the children they’ve been raising for years, I feel compelled to talk about money.  It really is quite ugly, but there you have it.

Broaden Sen. Stanley’s reach for a moment and picture this: a national ban on gay adoptions/foster care would instantly affect as many as 14,000 children, and could cost as much as $130M – a burden of as much as $27M for some states.  If Sen. Stanley and his band of prurient do-gooders get their way here in Tennessee several hundred (maybe more) children will be kept in or returned to the state, which will pay for their food, clothing, education, health-care, and so on.  That’s us, folks.  We the people.  We’ll provide for their every need – except the most important one: love.  Some advantage, huh?

While I am reduced to arguing about people’s lives in terms of fiscal management, real families are being affected.  I know some of them.  It’s difficult enough to live with the weight of an ignorant society’s scorn.  Now they have to live with the fear that their families will be ripped apart.  I’ll say it again: it’s ugly.  But creating a law that would deny even one child a loving home, or rip one out of a caring family’s embrace, simply to satisfy someone’s righteous finger-wagging is far uglier. 

Sandra Garrett