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.
To be clear, the issue in Oklahoma wasn’t that standing police orders would require the kids of same-sex parents to be seized. And, no state law there prohibits a single gay parent from adopting.
However, it also seemed clear to one of the plaintiff families (who had promised to bring their daughter to visit her birth family in OK) that travelling to the state could thrust the family in legal limbo. (The appellate judge disagreed, citing an an inadvertent loophole in the anti-gay state law.)
The case was decided in favor of plaintiffs whose adoptions had been granted in CA and NJ, before they moved to OK. They hadn’t had their kids seized, but were living with justifiable anxiety about their families’ status. One family had to rely on ER staff who initially refused, but then bent the rules, to allow both parents to be present for the care of their daughter. The second had disciplined themselves to ensure that only the bio-parent signed consent forms for school activities, as well as for medical care when one of their twins had surgery.
That pic of the kid looks like it was taken during the Great Depression – google Jackie Coogan as the Kid. Speaks volumes about these bottom feeders.