A Tenable Belief and Good As You assess Focus on the Family’s latest ad campaign, which exploits stock photos of unhappy children. The ad campaign’s objectives:

  • humiliate children whose adoptive parents happen to be gay,
  • redirect a backlog of unadopted children into fundamentalist Christian foster-care and halfway-house assignments, and
  • promote an Oklahoma law that sought to enable state police and antigay medical authorities to seize the children of families that visit or drive through Oklahoma, if it were reported to (or suspected by) authorities that the adoptive parents might be gay.

Oklahoma prohibits adoption by couples that are gay; that law remains in effect. But a recently passed law would have gone much farther — possibly revoking the parental rights of adoptive couples passing through Oklahoma who did not conform to Oklahoma’s own adoption laws. The new law was overruled by a judge who respects U.S. constitutional values; Focus and FRC (both enemies of states’ rights on the gay-marriage issue) are raising the states’ rights flag to defend a “right” of fundamentalist states to impose their antifamily laws upon families from non-fundamentalist states.

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