Freedom to Marry E-Update
Issue # 13 | March 15, 2006

Dear friend —

In February, anti-gay legislators in the Ohio House of Representatives introduced a bill to ban lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Ohioans from adopting or providing foster care to needy children. If passed, Ohio would surpass even Florida, where thousands of kids are denied adoptive parents willing to take them in, simply because those parents are lesbian or gay. Anti-gay crusaders in at least 16 states have spent the past several months pushing laws or ballot initiatives that would restrict the ability of gay individuals and couples to continue adopting and providing foster care to kids, heedless of those kids' real needs and best interests.

Michiganders Lori and Cin Dine’, who told their story in our Story Center, have been together for 11 years. They are the parents of three “beautiful, smart, and well adjusted children.” Denied the freedom to marry and the security and ease of family integrity that the law provides along with marriage, they had to take extreme measures. To create a legal relationship between each parent and the other's biological child, they went to court. Lori explains, “In order for us to [protect our family], we actually had to make our children wards of the state and then we both had to adopt them back… The courtroom was actually locked so nobody could come in and fight the adoptions or try to adopt the kids from under us.”

One of the anti-gay industry's favorite talking-points is that gay parents deprive children of a mother or a father. This is a deliberately inflammatory use of the classic rhetoric of prejudice to make it sound like same-sex couples are snatching children's birth-parents away from them. The implication is entirely false and morally repugnant. Giving a child a home, or strengthening the family in which a child is born or raised, does not deprive her of anything.

Millions of kids in this country — children in every state — have gay parents, and authorities as respected and knowledgeable as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association agree that it is in the best interests of these kids to provide their family the same support and protections as others — including the freedom to marry. Gay men and lesbians will continue to have kids — whether biologically or through adopting and/or parenting the kids of their partner as well as other children needing care. All these children deserve to know that their relationship with both of their parents is stable and legally recognized. If we as a society care about kids—real kids, not just rhetorical children used as a weapon in a culture war—then we have to acknowledge that same-sex couples do have children and those children, it follows, have gay parents. Those kids deserve protection and security.

It simply makes no sense to say, on the one hand, “We care about children,” and then, on the other hand, punish some kids for having the “wrong parents” by denying their families marriage and its many tangible and intangible benefits. Whether the anti-gay assault is on parenting or on marriage, the right response is for us to talk about real families and the illogic and injustice of undermining couples and their kids.

— Evan Wolfson

Follow developments in the movement for marriage equality on our website, and in future issues of Freedom to Marry's bi-monthly E-Update.