So states, in oddly plain and blunt legislative language, the law of the State of Florida.   Last month, a Miami-Dade judge declared the law “unconstitutional on its face” and unrelated to the best interests of the child.  She appointed custody of [...]]]> “No person eligible to adopt under this statute may adopt if that person is homosexual.”

So states, in oddly plain and blunt legislative language, the law of the State of Florida.   Last month, a Miami-Dade judge declared the law “unconstitutional on its face” and unrelated to the best interests of the child.  She appointed custody of an infant (removed from home almost immediately) to a family member who is a lesbian in a committed relationship.  Florida’s Department of Child and Family Services filed its appeal last week.  The state’s argument and the spirit of the 1977 law boil down to the idea that adoptive parenting by homosexuals is so obviously harmful to children that prohibiting it is “rationally related” to a legitimate state aim.  The idea is that heterosexuals are, by definition, better parents.  This claim, wherever it asserts itself, is more than baseless and bigoted toward homosexuals.  It is tragically shortsighted and remarkably cruel to the roughly 100,000 American children (about 7% of them in Florida) waiting to be adopted out of the foster care system.

Several gay friends of mine refer to straight people as “breeders.”  And indeed, breed we do.  Heterosexuals, generally by definition, produce millions of children each year.  And a disturbing percentage of us rip our own children apart like dogs with a chew toy.  In two very different cities where I served as an ADA, I encountered fathers who sexually abused their children over years, beginning before the children were in first grade.  I saw mothers who literally starved their children to death, or pimped them out for drugs, rent or just extra cash.  I saw toddlers pressed against heating grates by one or both parents as if in a waffle iron.  I saw fathers who shook infants to blindness and epilepsy, their ribs snapping like dry twigs in the process.  In one particularly brutal shaken baby case I prosecuted in the Bronx in 2006, the mother sided with the offending father (a drug dealer) and refused to cooperate with me even while her son languished in a NICU on the edge of death.  The people who did these things came from a broad diversity of racial, ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds and circumstances.  In fact, there were only two things common to every one of the most brutal physical and sexual abuse cases I worked on:

1.  The children involved, if they survived, needed new homes and new parents.

2.  The biological parents, whether perpetrators or accomplices, were all heterosexual.

I’m not claiming that homosexual parents, adoptive or biological, can’t or don’t abuse their children.  I’m just saying I’ve never seen it.  Not in nearly 15 years.  The point is not that homosexuals are perfect.  The point is that they’re human, and when they are successful, compassionate, loving and stable adults who want to improve the life of a child without a home, they should be considered as adoptive parents.

Opponents of homosexual adoption often try to point to non-religious, “objective factors” to support their arguments.  They never get far.  No reputable scientific evidence supports a single claim that homosexual parents will be less successful or even that they will somehow foster a homosexual lifestyle on the part of their children.  One of the last legislative pushes to prove that homosexuals are naturally disordered and dangerous as parents came from a particularly despicable Virginia legislator in 2004 (to my eternal shame, he represented my hometown of Sterling Park for seven years). The bill he finally got passed in the House of Delegates would have required social workers to investigate whether perspective adoptive parents were homosexual.  The rationale, that homosexuality was related to increased levels of child molestation among other things, was based largely on junk science spewed by a single discredited and religiously biased sociologist.  The bill, and the sociologist, were eventually routed in the Virginia senate, thanks in good measure to courageous Republicans who called this effort out for the rank bigotry that it was.

Although Biblical views of homosexuality (and similar non-Judeo-Christian religious tenets) are the primary force behind laws like Florida’s and efforts like Virginia’s, I won’t engage in a wholesale bashing of these religious views.  There’s enough of that going on, and bigotry against religious people is as bad as bigotry toward anyone.  To hold strict religious views is a private and sometimes difficult choice, and I know many decent Christians (among other religious) who struggle to reconcile the doctrines of their faith with their common experience as compassionate people.  I draw the line, though, when positions based solely on religious doctrine become law in a pluralistic society.  And I draw it in red when children- discarded, debased or destroyed by the supposedly “sexually healthy” people who created them, are languishing in a far too often chaotic, uncertain and flawed foster care system.

© 2010, Roger Canaff. All rights reserved.

But they won’t getcha, ‘Cuz I’m right here witcha On the Night Train

Swing low, Saint Cadillac Tearin’ down the alley And [...]]]> Here I’m going
Walkin’ with my baby in my arms
‘Cuz I am in the wrong end of the eight ball black
And the devil, see, he’s right behind us
And this worker said she’s gonna take my little baby
My little angel back

But they won’t getcha,
‘Cuz I’m right here witcha
On the Night Train

Swing low, Saint Cadillac
Tearin’ down the alley
And I’m reachin’ so high for ya
Don’t let ‘em take me back
Broken like valiums and chumps in the rain
That cry and quiver

When a blue horizon is sleeping in the station
With a ticket for a train
Surely mine will deliver me there
Here she comes …
I’m safe here with you
On the Night Train

Oh mamma, mamma,
Concrete is wheeling by
Down at the end of a lullaby
On the Night Train.

—Rickie Lee Jones. From the eponymous 1979 album. The song is “Night Train.” It is beautiful and haunting.

I first heard it when I was probably 16, maybe four years after the album was released. Even then it spoke to me. A desperate woman. A helpless baby she’s responsible for, completely now that ‘dad’ is long gone, assuming he was ever there for anything but the requisite chemical reaction in the first place. And if he stuck around for a while, it was probably just to do more damage.

“And this worker says she’s gonna take my baby, my angel.”

In many years of this work, I’ve yet to meet the mother or the child who welcomed the intervention of Child Protective Services (or ACS, Administration for Children’s Services, as we called it in NYC). Few jobs are more difficult than that of a CPS worker, pulling a screaming and terrified child from her mother, sometimes in the middle of the night, for reasons the child can’t possibly fathom. Anyone who believes that a hungry, dirty, abused or neglected kid will welcome the strangers who arrive to remove her from the only reality she’s ever known is sorely misled. It really doesn’t matter what the child is dealing with, and how miserable and inappropriate it seems to the well-intentioned interlopers. To the child, the barren cabinets, the rotten smell in the fridge, the rodent droppings and the paint chips in the hallway are just what she knows. And it’s all she’s ever known. Given a choice between what’s awful and what’s unknown, most adults- let alone children- will grasp the former.

So word gets around, and sometimes, the mothers run. They do whatever they can to stay a step ahead of those who purport to know better, whether it’s the right thing to do or not. Running is open-ended, like an impulsive visit to a casino. It’s a one-way ticket to something better, maybe. Or maybe not. In any event, it’s an uncertain path. On that path, they trust no one. And frankly, I don’t blame them.

“But they won’t getcha, ‘Cuz I’m right here witcha. On the Night Train.”

I’ve worked with women who had been victimized by life- and every male in it- up until the thing that put them on the other side of my desk. Sometimes it was the biological father of the child in a sex case; a lot of people are surprised at how often biological fathers sexually abuse their own children. Sometimes it was a boyfriend, or a second husband, or whomever else looked at the time like something stable and basically good. Until, of course, that illusion disintegrated in a principal’s office, or a hospital, or a police station. Until it fell through like wet paper with the details of what he’d done to her daughter or son behind her back. While she was at work. While she was with friends. While she was out clubbing, or at a 12 step meeting, or wherever else the daily routine took her. The details ring in her ears while she clutches her purse and fights back tears. And wonders what the hell she’ll do now.

So the gears of the system turn, and eventually she arrives in my office.

At that point it’s crucial to remember, if I’m going to be effective in any way, shape or form, that to her I’m simply the next man in the line. I’m further trouble, just not the kind that will leave a bruise. The tie I wear glows as malevolently as a nightstick. The desk I sit behind is the perfect barrier between everything that I am and everything that I’m entitled to, and everything that she is, and will never have. It’s that simple.

And so I come out from behind the desk, and sometimes I lose the tie. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

“When a blue horizon is sleeping in the station, with a ticket for a train, surely mine will deliver me there. Here she comes. I’m safe here with you. On the Night Train.”

The train image might be a little antiquated. The urge to run isn’t.

“Concrete is wheeling by. Down at the end of a lullaby.”

The end of a lullaby. That’s where I work, which is say, live. I’ve never wanted to be anywhere else.

© 2009 – 2010, Roger Canaff. All rights reserved.