A Stitch in Haste

(For Terrance.)

One of the darkest days (and there have been several) in gay rights litigation was January 10, 2005, when the Supreme Court announced that it would not hear an appeal to Florida's ban on gay adoption.

There was widespread hope, indeed a reasonable expectation, that the Court would take the appeal. Lawrence v. Texas was then still new news -- it had been handed down only 18 months earlier; the momentum it would generate was still unclear. The Court had recently expressed an interest in other family law matters (e.g., visitation rights of grandparents), and there was already a broad consensus that "adoption is different," that the near-universal legal doctrine -- that the only permissible criterion for evaluating adoptive parents or adoption policy is "the best interests of the child" -- surely pre-empted any attempt to codify irrational discrimination against otherwise qualified potential adoptive parents who happened to be gay. Would the courts actually allow children to be sacrificed at the altar of anti-gay bigotry?

Yes. At least in Florida. At least for the time being.

In the time since, a sea change has occurred. Anticipating a cascading effect from the "backlash" against gay marriage at around the same time (i.e., November 2004), many gay activists and observers, dejected and depressed, simply assumed that "adoption would be next." So too did the bigots: several radical social conservative groups introduced the same kind of measures to ban gay adoption that swept like a cruel plague through the redneck red states.

But this time, it didn't work.

For the most part, such proposals fell on deaf ears. It's one thing, apparently, to oppress gay adults. But even the bigots said, in large numbers: Leave dem kids alone!

Perhaps it was because there were already so many examples of successful gay adoptions -- doomsday had never come the way it would supposedly come to Massachusetts for having "wrecked traditional families." Perhaps it was the self-apparent need to leave no adopter behind: Florida passed its bigot ban while 8,000 innocent children languished in foster care; there are 150,000 such children nationwide. Maybe grassroots anti-gay activism burned itself out. Or maybe it really was "only about marriage."

In any case, the forest fire of antipathy toward same-sex marriage never spread to prophylactic bans on gay adoption. No state banned gay adoption as part of the "backlash" (but see this post). (Mississippi bizarrely bans gay couples but not gay singles from adoption. I can't begin to fathom the reasoning there. Utah, meanwhile, has a long-standing ban on any unmarried couples, straight or gay, from adopting. Because Utah loves its needy children so much that it will not hesitate to keep them in "compassionate" foster care and out of stable but unwed homes.)

Fast forward to today:

The organization hoping to stop unmarried couples from adopting or becoming foster parents in Arkansas got the go-ahead Thursday to start a petition drive to earn a spot on next year's general election ballot.

Attorney General Dustin McDaniel certified the Family Council's proposed [initiative] act, clearing the way for the conservative organization to begin collecting signatures. If enough have been gathered by summer, the proposal will qualify for the ballot in the Nov. 4, 2008, election.
...
The measure is the Family Council's latest response to the 2006 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional the state's administrative ban on homosexuals serving as foster parents.

One preliminary hasty stitch: This is not a state constitutional amendment -- merely a voter initiative. It can be overturned by a two-thirds vote of the Arkansas legislature or struck down by the courts (something they did not hesitate to do in the past).

Why an initiative and not a constitutional amendment? One possible reason is that the signature requirement is significantly lower for an initiative in Arkansas than for an amendment. Draw your own inferences.

Meanwhile, here's what separates (most) gays from (most) bigots. We have no interest in conscripting children as our foot soldiers in the culture wars. We want this hateful, un-Christian, child-abusing measure to go quietly into that bad night. We want it not to receive enough signatures. If it does, then we want it to be defeated at the polls. If it is not, then we want the legislature to promptly overturn it. If it does not, then we want state judges to promptly strike it down. If they don't, then we want federal judges to strike it down. The one thing we don't want is to see Arkansas foster parents' names on another Supreme Court petition.

Even if that's the only way to revisit the Florida ban and to elevate forevermore the interests of children over the interests of bigots across the entire nation.

Not because such a petition might fail -- there is little downside in that at this point (unlike the heartbreaking and maddening same-sex marriage litigation losses in New York, Washington, New Jersey and now Maryland).

We want this abomination to implode quickly, and locally, precisely because we don't use and abuse children in this manner. We do not welcome the shackling of gay families in Arkansas today so that we might liberate gay families in Florida or Utah tomorrow. We don't use people -- we don't use children -- as pawns in the political process. For us it really is "all about the children."

And that's why we're better than the bigots.

More thoughts at Bilerico, Pam's House Blend, Good As You.