No Longer Parents?

Good old Mississippi is at it again. I say "again" because even though I can't come up with any particular example of recent discriminatory behavior by the state of Mississippi when I heard the news it just didn't surprise me.

In March 2000 the state House Judiciary Committee approved a bill which would not only ban adoptions by gay and lesbian couples but would also require that the state not recognize previously approved adoptions by gay and lesbian couples.

In support of the bill Rep. Gary Chism (a Republican, which I'm sure shocks you as much as it shocks me) opined, "Lawmakers ought to make sure that we [do] not sentence a child who's already had one bad turn in life to something we know is improper and immoral. Kids turn out more balanced having a traditional family --- a mother and a father."

This, contrary to the recent study by the American Psychological Association which found that no evidence has ever been found that children of gay or lesbian parents are disadvantaged in any significant way by comparison to children raised by heterosexual parents and which concluded, "home environments provided by gay and lesbian parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children's phychosocial growth."

Rims Barber, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) attorney representing a gay couple planning to adopt, found it ironic that supporters of the ban were not moving for legislation which would bar adoptions by people who pose an actual and proven danger to children, such as child molesters, and posited that gays and lesbians were being targeted in order to appeal to the "Christian Right." "That's no way to run a state," she said.

It appears that in the wake of recent success by the Religious Reich in passing bans on same-gender marriage it appears that parenting and adoption are the next target. NGLTF reports that these efforts were less than successful in 1999 that while some state agencies did pass regulations against adoptions by gays and lesbians, several other states reversed the trend, strengthening the rights of gays and lesbians to adopt. The dicotemy perhaps most evident in California which voted in April 2000, to define marriage as between a man and a woman even while its popular governor, Gray Davis, withdrew prior Governor Pete Wilson's order to Child Services to provide a negative home study report when investigating petitions for adoption by gays and lesbians.

However, the balance of the trend in 2000 has not been as positive. Utah recently approved a ban on adoption by gay and lesbian couples, joining Florida (the state in which Rosie O'Donnell has adopted all three of her children) which previously had been the only state with an outright ban on the books. Three more states are considering similar laws, South Carolina (home of Jesse Helms), Oklahoma (where the winds come sweeping down the plains) and Hawaii (site of the recent Right to Marry debacle).

ACLU attorneys predict that the Mississippi ban, if passed, would be a violation of the "Full Faith and Credit" clause of the United States Constitution which requires states to honor legal acts and contracts performed in other states.

However, the law would still have full force and effect until legal actions resulted in it being struck down.

Apparently Mississippi has nothing better to do. After all, they're close to last in the nation in the number of children living in poverty, the percentage of pregnant women without prenatal care and the number of children lacking health insurance. What more pressing issue could there be to take precedence excluding the loving homes of gays and lesbians from adopting children currently living in foster care.