A friend sent me photos of street light posters he saw lining the streets of Hollywood. These posters were recruiting foster and adoptive parents in honor of National Adoption Month. What could be better than trying to recruit more foster and adoptive parents?
But my friend noticed something odd: there were absolutely no mothers in any of these posters. All posters featured pairs of men, smiling with their adoptive African American children.
Posters, recruiting gay foster parents on Highland near the Hollywood Bowl
So I went and took a look at the website for the campaign called www.RaiseaChild.us It is a campaign specifically to recruit gay men and lesbians to become foster and adoptive parents.
One of the partners in this campaign is called, “Southern California Foster Family and Adoption Agency.” They state in their press release supporting this campaign, “nearly 50% of the families our agency works with are headed by single or partnered gays and lesbians.”
Why isn’t 50% gay families “inclusive” enough? Let’s say this particular private agency chooses to specialize completely in placing children with same sex couples and same sex attracted individuals. Yet I doubt that religious agencies are allowed to specialize in adoptions with heterosexual married couples.
And there is disinformation associated with this campaign. One of the partners in the campaign states, “Throughout the United States, there are an estimated 1 million gay households raising 2 million children.” But according to the very gay-friendly Williams Institute’s analysis, there are less than 650,000 same sex couples in the United States. Of those, about 111,000 are raising their “own” children, which the Williams Institute defines as, “never-married children under 18 who are sons or daughters of one partner or spouse (Person 1) by birth, marriage (stepchild), or adoption.”
How the Raise A Child campaign and its partners come up with a number of “1 million gay households raising 2 million children,” is a mystery to me.
The campaign for gay foster parents, on Universal Studio Blvd
And look at the children in these posters. I wonder what the African-American community thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of their community who have been taken from their parents. Do the African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine they do. But I will let them speak for themselves.
What I want to know is this: Why aren’t we recruiting stable heterosexual married couples to be foster parents? After all, we know for sure that children do best in married couple low-conflict households. Same sex parenting is an untried social experiment. Parenting by male couples is especially unstudied, since it is exceedingly uncommon. Even the very pro-gay researchers Judith Stacey, could find only one study comparing gay male parenting with heterosexual couples that qualified for inclusion in her comprehensive survey of gay parenting studies.[1]
Now I realize that stable heterosexual married couples might not be so easy to find in Hollywood. But hey, LA is a big town. There are lots of nice neighborhoods you could go to recruit stable heterosexual married couples, assuming, of course, that helping children really is the main point of the campaign.
From the beginning of the sexual revolution, from no fault divorce to widespread cohabitation to out of wedlock childbearing, society has been surrendering the interests of children to the interests of adults, far too often and far too lightly. Many of the children in foster care, landed there precisely because of the failures of earlier episodes in the sexual revolution. Some are the children of unmarried mothers, or teen mothers. Some have been abused by their mothers’ live-in boyfriends, who are statistically by far the most dangerous people for children to live with.
Children in foster care are the most vulnerable children in society. These kids deserve better than to be human guinea pigs, in yet another round of social experimentation. We should be pulling out all the stops to recruit stable heterosexual married couples to care for these children, not using their plight as an opportunity to “celebrate diversity.” End of story.
[1] “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, Journal of Marriage and Family, 72 (February 2010) pg. 6, 7 and discussion on pp 12-13.
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