in 2006, Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith legally adopted a Louisiana child while they were living in NY; they wanted both their names to appear on the birth certificate. Their simple request that Louisiana acknowledge reality was ruled against by a federal appeals court, and now the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.
In their appeal, spearheaded by the gay rights advocacy group Lambda Legal, the couple said it was important both practically and symbolically they both be listed as the legal parents.
“Obtaining an amended birth certificate that accurately identifies both parents of an adopted child is vitally important for multiple purposes, including determining the parents’ and child’s right to make medical decisions for other family members at the necessary moments; determining custody, care, and support of the child in the event of a separation or divorce between the parents,” the legal brief said.
Lawyers for the men also said it is vitally necessary for Social Security and tax purposes, inheritance, insurance, school registration, and obtaining a passport.
Adar and Smith tried to have the birth certificate changed in Louisiana. All states have laws creating a right to accurate, amended official birth and identity documents that would be recognized in other states and by the federal government.
Darlene Smith, Louisiana’s registrar of vital records and statistics, refused their request. She took the position that the term “adoptive parents” in the applicable section of state law applies only to married parents, because in Louisiana, only married couples may jointly adopt a child.
Not that marriage in New York was an option open to this couple when they adopted their son. But the adoption did go through. Ms. Smith appears to have been pretending that these gentlemen were married for purposes of adoption, but not for purposes of record-keeping.
Why, Darlene, why such time and effort to screw people over, including innocent children? These men are both the parents–your employer, the state of Louisiana, would seem to have acknowledged as much by allowing the adoption. Why couldn’t you have made a note of the fact in the public record and let everybody get on with their lives?
It amazes me how much the Christian press and fundamentalist leaders will just outright lie to their flocks. LifeSiteNews is whining about the “Every Child Deserves a Family” act, introduced by Rep. Pete Stark [D-CA]. The main purpose of the bill is to address the myriad number of kids who go homeless in this country every year, in part by denying federal funds to adoption agencies that discriminate against qualified loving parents, i.e. religious organizations that won’t place kids with loving gay couples. Here, let the Washington Blade explain:
The Every Child Deserves a Family Act, which has 33 original co-sponsors, would restrict federal funds for states that allow discrimination in adoption or foster care placement based on the sexual orientation, marital status or gender identity of potential parents — as well as LGBT children seeking homes. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is expected to introduce companion legislation in June in the Senate.
[...]
At the news conference, Stark billed the legislation as a means to ensure children living in the foster care system have access to a greater number of adoptive families — including households with single parents or same-sex parents.
“What’s in the child’s best interest is what the bill is trying to promote,” Stark said. “There is no information that shows that children raised by a single parent or gay or lesbian parent households have any more or less problems than all other children.”
According to Stark’s office, the U.S. government spends more than $7 billion each year on a foster care system against potential single and LGBT parents and allows around 25,000 children age out annually. More than 500,000 children are in foster care and 120,000 of them available for adoption.
See? It’s a two-fer. On the one hand, it’s about considering the children first, but it has the side effect of correcting an injustice for LGBT families. As you can read for yourself [because you are liberals], the bill, again, denies federal funds to groups that discriminate. It doesn’t force them to shut down. It just says, “here, if you are a bigot, that is fine, but get off the government teat.”
So how does LifeSiteNews breathlessly report this to their mouth-moving readers?
Ominous House Bill would effectively ban US
Christian adoption agencies
Holy crap, they lie in the headline!
A bill reintroduced into the U.S. House of Representatives this month proposes federal-level punishment for states that ban homosexual couples and non-married individuals from adopting children. Effectively, the bill would ban all Catholic and Christian adoption agencies or forbid them from acting on faith beliefs.
And they lie in the first paragraph! That federal-level “punishment” is simply a withholding of federal support. If you need to be a bigot, and also run an adoption agency, get your own damn donors! It is that simple.
Later in the piece, LifeSite decided to contact a hate group executive for his opinion:
Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council, agreed. “It would have the effect of either banning Christian adoption agencies or forbidding them from acting on their faith convictions and their moral convictions in terms of what is in the best interest of a child,” he warned.
Sprigg said that Christian organizations, such as Catholic Charities are among the “most effective adoption agencies” which have an “outstanding record”. Additionally, he said, “unique problems” associated with homosexual couples and non-married couples indicate that these homes are “likely to be less stable than a married husband-and-wife household.”
Uh huh. First of all, Peter is lying about “unique problems” making gay couples’ households “less stable.” We know this. We know how the FRC lies with research. There is NO credible evidence that kids do any worse with same-sex couples. And his remark about “forbidding [bigot agencies] from acting on their faith convictions and their moral convictions in terms of what is in the best interest of a child” is not true either. Again, they’re just losing federal funding. If they rely on that in order to stay open, well, sucks for them. The problem — for the bigots — is that “what is best for the child” is not open to religious interpretation. “Religious interpretation” for Christian Scientists would suggest that the “best interests” of a child with leukemia involve prayer. Irrefutable facts about the “best interests” of that child, on the other hand, would lead the parents to head to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis as quickly as possible. Likewise, fundamentalist bigot interpretations of what is in the “best interests” of children who are in the system may exist, but that does not mean that they are actually correct, and really, in a nation as large as this one, with hundreds of thousands of kids In The System, we need to be supporting adoption agencies , on a governmental level, that truly look out for the best interests of those kids, ALL of them. So run around with your “religious interpretation” of the best situation for kids all you want, but if you want to receive federal money, if this bill is passed, you’re going to have to go with the grown-up, fact-based version of what’s best for those kids.
So sorry. Go cry about your religious freedom now. It’s abundantly obvious to the rest of us that you religious wingnuts care far more about upholding your easy-to-shatter misconceptions about the world around you than you EVER will care about actual kids in need.
It’s got to be pretty painful for hate group leader Tony Perkins when these days, he even loses debates on Fox News. Watch as Bernard Whitman of Faith In America, a gay father himself, clearly calls Tony out for his lies regarding gay parenting and the anti-gay Arizona adoption bill. I hope the anti-gay Religious Right is making plans for their coming irrelevancy, because if this is all they’ve got, the clock is ticking.
Last night on Facebook, I gave Jan Brewer a hair of credit for vetoing a birther bill that would require candidates to prove their US citizenship, either through a birth certificate or perhaps, a circumcision record [really], to Arizona’s Secretary of State before being allowed on the ballot. Apparently even Jan Brewer is weirded out by the idea of a candidate bringing his ritual penis cutting certificate to the State House.
But let us not get too excited, please? Jan Brewer is still one of the world’s worst wingnuts, and the goalposts of “too crazy” have been moved so far to the right in the past several years that she really deserves no credit for doing one sane thing. Moreover, on the same day she vetoed that birther bill, she signed this one:
Yesterday, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) signed Senate Bill 1188, requiring state-funded and private adoption agencies “to give primary consideration to adoptive placement with a married man and woman, with all other criteria being equal.” This doesn’t mean that gay couples wouldn’t be able to adopt in the state, but they would have to fall to the back of the line simply because of their sexual orientation.
Absent any evidence that straight adoptive parents are better than gay adoptive parents [religious dogma is not evidence, fools], and flat against the needs of her state’s children, she decided to go ahead and sign this bigoted bill which simply seeks to make gay and lesbian couples’ lives more difficult.
“The governor’s action today is harmful to children in foster care and group homes who are seeking a permanent home and the support of a loving, caring family,” Mann said. “SB 1188 takes the focus off of what’s in the best interest of a child when adoption decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis, according to what’s in a child’s best interest. Each case is unique. For example, adoption authorities may have the choice between placing a child with a beloved single aunt — or complete strangers. The only consideration should be determining what’s in the best interest of the child.”
So, the new Republican governor of Florida, Rick Scott, thinks that court rulings don’t apply to him, because of His Beliefs probably, so he’s got a new plan to make sure that kids in foster care stay there as long as possible:
Despite a state appellate panel’s ruling last year striking down the Florida ban on adoption by “homosexual” people and the decision by the then-governor and attorney general — Republican-turned-Independent Charlie Crist and Republican Bill McCullom, respectively — that they would not pursue State Supreme Court review of the decision, the new governor, Republican Rick Scott, is stoking the fire that most had considered extinguished for good.
According to the Associated Press, when Scott appeared before reporters in Tallahassee on January 19 to discussed his newly appointed director of Children and Families, David Wilkins, he said, “Adoption should be by a married couple.”
In response to Scott’s statement, Florida Together, an LGBT equality group, said, “Obviously, this is an end-run around the courts on gay and lesbian-inclusive adoption. It could remove millions of Floridians from the adoption process and leave tens of thousands of children in state foster care who could otherwise be adopted by loving families.”
The article goes on to point out that David Wilkins is the finance chair of Florida Baptist Children’s Homes, which is just like it sounds. How many times does it have to be said: no one cares about your Deeply Held Personal Beliefs, but if you can’t check them at the door when it’s time to go to grown-up work, especially if you are in government, then maybe it’s time to find a new job.
I don’t agree with every one of his constructions here, as he seems to be talking from the standpoint of “what’s a greater sin? Homosexuality or X?”, but his general point is solid and powerful:
When I told a religious friend about being inspired by Rosie [O'Donnell] adopting four children, he said to me, “How sad that these kids are never going to have a father.” Lost on him was the irony that without Rosie they would not have a mother either.
Now, Rosie has a media microphone and can fend for herself. But I think about all the other gay adoptive parents who are under assault as being ill-equipped to adopt. We’ve heard all the arguments. Gay parents who adopt will make their children gay (offensive and stupid). Every child deserves a mother and a father (I addressed this above). Gay is an abomination, to which I would respond that leaving a child to grow up in an orphanage where nobody wants them might be an even greater act of sacrilege.
But to my fellow straight people I offer the following challenge. You have every right to oppose gay marriage. It’s a free country. We don’t suppress opinions. But aren’t you under a moral obligation to adopt the children in their stead? Surely leaving kids to drown without love is deeply immoral. But to stop others from rescuing them is an abomination.
[...]
A few years ago on my radio show I interviewed two gay men who were in court fighting the government of Florida — my home state, where gay adoption is prohibited — to adopt a five-year-old African-American child who was mentally-handicapped. They had been picking the boy up from an orphanage every Sunday for about a year and now wanted to adopt him. One of the men said, “Nobody wants him. But we want him.” I choked up. The show went to dead air. I could not speak or respond. “Nobody wants him. But we want him.” Here was a child whose skin color for some was all wrong and whose intelligence did not always match up. But to these two men the boy was perfect.
[...]
That some would prefer that unwanted children remain in orphanages rather than in warm and welcoming homes is a sad commentary on the self-appointed morality police of our time.
The other day, we reported on a doctor in the United Kingdom who was crying “religious discrimination!,” due to the fact that she, according to her Christian beliefs, wouldn’t vote to place children for adoption with gay couples. Unfortunately for her, this is a case where certain professions have standards all are expected to adhere to, standards that are based in fact and evidence. It is unfortunate that some people cling to religious beliefs which are so clearly at odds with reality, but it does not mean we should give them a free pass to do their jobs poorly due to their beliefs.
Dr. Sheila Matthews took her claims of “discrimination” before an employment tribunal and was flatly denied:
According to the BBC, regional employment judge John MacMillan said there was no evidence that Dr Matthews had suffered religious discrimination at the hands of the council, nor that she had been treated differently from how any other member of the panel would be treated if they asked to abstain.
He said: “The complaints of religious discrimination fail and are dismissed. This case fails fairly and squarely on its facts. In our judgement, at least from the time of the pre-hearing review, the continuation of these proceedings was plainly misconceived … they were doomed to fail.
“There is simply no factual basis for the claims.”
According to the BBC, Dr Matthews told the hearing that her Christian beliefs led her to believe that the “most appropriate” environment for raising children was within the context of a marriage between a man and a woman.
It’s quite irrelevant what her “Christian beliefs” lead her to believe about adoption placement, for good or ill. What matters is what decades of study, in her own field, have shown to be the best outcomes for the children in concern. The fact that reality conflicts with religious belief is, I understand, often painful and confusing, but it doesn’t make it any less real.
A Florida appeals court Wednesday struck down a state law barring gay men and lesbians from adoption on the basis of equal protection under law.
The Florida 3rd District Court of Appeal upheld a trial court ruling that Florida’s explicit ban was unconstitutional, noting that the state’s adoption law required officials to assess potential adoptive parents in “the best interests of the child.”
“By the time of the trial below, the application of the statutory ban was contrary to both the professional judgment of the Department and the legislative directive to assure ‘the best interest of the child’ in ‘every’ adoption,” wrote Judge Cindy S. Lederman in the 42-page ruling.
Shortly after the unanimous ruling was announced, Gov. Charlie Crist — who is running for a U.S. Senate seat as an independent — said the state would “stop enforcing the ban.” A supporter of the ban earlier in his career, when he was a Republican, Crist added that he was very pleased with the ruling.
It is about time. That law was such an embarrassment to the state of Florida.
It’s fun to watch, though, now that so many cases involving equality are on the move, how truly, our opponents have no rational case for anything they say or believe.
Good morning! I am Father John — standing in for Father Clifford Banes who is in court on unspecified charges today.
Today we are blessed, dear Catholic brothers and sisters, with a reading from the Book of Wikipedia:
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a parable told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (10:25-37). In the parable, a Jewish traveler is beaten, robbed, and left half dead along the road. First a priest and then a Levite come by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan comes by. Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the Samaritan helps the injured Jew.
Jesus is described as telling the parable in response to a question regarding the identity of the “neighbor” which Leviticus 19:18 says should be loved.
This is the word of the Internet Lord.
(Thanks be to God.)
My dear Catholic brothers and sisters. Clearly Jesus was an idiot. We must take heed of the idiocy of today’s reading, and learn from our brothers in Britain who show us the way to true holiness.
Britain’s charity regulatory commission has ruled that the Catholic Care adoption agency must serve gay couples. The agency had demanded that it be exempt from the nation’s anti-discrimination laws. … “The charity is very disappointed with the outcome, Catholic Care will now consider whether there is any other way in which the charity can continue to support families seeking to adopt children in need,” the group said in a statement.
Dear brothers and sisters, the Romans are at our doorstep — threatening to force us to be like the wicked Samaritan who helps the unholy in times of need. We are being persecuted, my children. Stand alert!
Do you want to be holy like me, the priest of the parable, or do you want to be brought down to the level of a despicable Samaritan?
Let us now rise and sing righteous songs of self-praise. For we are God’s people — and they are not!
They just continue to show us up. Having just ruled that marriages performed in Mexico City be recognized throughout the nation, the Supreme Court upheld, by a vote of 9-2, that gay couples are also entitled to adoption rights in that city.
It’s so encouraging, watching the rest of the world pass us by.
