Roger Canaff » Religion

Equal Opportunity in Adoption: Necessary, Proper and Desperately Needed

Roger Canaff — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:21:12 +0000

“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.

Angel Band Project: Nudging Me When I Needed It Most

Roger Canaff — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:59:40 +0000

There’s a fairly young but now well-used expression that goes “Let go and let God.” For the last several weeks in particular, although it goes quite a bit farther back than that, I’ve been struggling with something that feels like the inverse: “Let God, or let go.” In other words, I feel like I’m nearing a “two roads diverged” choice in terms of my spirituality. The choice is about how I’ll view God, and God’s love. On one hand, I can accept a personally involved, loving God (as Christians should) and continue to try to make sense of the world He created within that framework. On the other, I can let go and give in to long-held Deist tendencies that tell me that God is there, magnificent and basically benevolent, but that He loves us in a way we can’t- and aren’t supposed- to understand. That even from within Catholicism, the prism I still view God through, I’ll come to believe that His presence in our lives- this one, anyway- isn’t what I was brought up to think. I’m hardly the first person to struggle with this question. Untold millions have viewed and suffered human horror that dwarfs my imagination; my life is charmed by comparison in every conceivable way. Yet many have come down still on the side of traditional notions of Judeo-Christian worship. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but despite the tonnage of horror I do see, I’ll admit there are times when God seems to remind me, if subtly, that things aren’t as clear as I’d like to think. The Angel Band Project is one of them.

The Crime.

In July of 2009, Teresa Butz was 39, engaged to her female partner, active in charitable causes in the Seattle area, and a deeply loved daughter, sister, friend and member of her community. As the two slept, a young man entered their home through a window with a knife. He raped and began stabbing both repeatedly until Teresa decided to fight back. She saved her partner’s life and lost her own. The crime was one of the worst local police had seen in years. This one act, spurred on by whatever unholy combination of drugs, instability and pure, undiluted evil, altered forever the life of one of these decent women and ended that of her soul mate in a paroxysm of blood and terror. We in the system have ways of dealing with these things, sometimes involving alcohol, cigarettes, or 100 other forms of self-medication. I usually get by with a few stiff drinks and can normally avoid the ontological angst. But stories like this one, thankfully rare but still being made, are the building blocks of the dark doubt in my mind that there is rhyme or reason to anything in the world as we see it.

The Project.

Teresa’s story has an angelic twist, though, something that despite the horror and sadness surrounding her death, scatters the darkness and bubbles up fountain-like with something hopeful. Something beautiful. Something almost ordered. Teresa’s partner, you see, is a conservatory trained vocalist. Her brother is a Tony award winning musician and actor. At Teresa’s funeral and memorial service, the singing and music experienced there inspired a project, which is Angel Band. It involves these two and others who loved Teresa, hitting different studios around the country and recording a tribute collection of songs in her honor. What I’ve heard so far is sometimes melodic and haunting, sometimes rock and roll heavy, but always captivating. It’s a work still in progress, easy to follow either on Facebook or the band’s web page. The proceeds will go to support a group I work with and admire greatly called The Voices and Faces Project. Voices and Faces is a documentary project that specializes in memorializing- either through audio or video- the accounts of survivors of sexual violence. Some are women in old age who for decades had never uttered a word of what they suffered. Some were violated in war, some in marriage, some in childhood. Their accounts put a deeply human face on sexual violence, something desperately needed in order to take one more step toward ending it altogether. It is, yet again, a matter of light, even a spark, penetrating and then destroying darkness.

I guess it’s the power of that light that, through both of these projects, threatens in benign fury the neat and unhappy picture of the world I have. But light is just a symbol. The real, beautiful, bountiful thing is order. Order suggests a Creator. Order suggests a destination as well as a journey, however tortured or smooth. Order suggests a reason for a beating heart. A reason for giving a damn at the end of another day. This isn’t to suggest that the chasm created by Teresa’s death will be at all filled by the great gesture of Angel Band. But it helps to see darkness- blind, random and cacophonous- scattered by light so wonderfully clear and guiding.

Upon the assassination of John Lennon, Elton John noted in song “it’s funny how one insect can damage so much grain.” Thanks to the acts of one particular insect, I’ll never know Teresa Butz. I’ll never experience her warmth, her kindness, her spirit. But thanks to the courage, love, and resolve of these remarkable people, I am blessed with a profound sense of what they saw in her, and more importantly, what just might lie beneath the surface- ordered, sane, and loving- of a far too broken and random looking world.