the kid
Dan Savage has got some brilliantly eloquent op-ed pieces out about gay marriage and adoption that just break my heart.
Same-Sex Marriage Wins by Losing
By Dan Savage
THERE were community meetings in Seattle on Wednesday. Some of the couples who had sued to overturn Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage, a case they lost before the state’s Supreme Court earlier that day, were going to appear. Gay and straight elected officials who support “marriage equality” were going to make speeches. I probably should have been there too.
But I had a previous engagement.
The Seattle Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays at Safeco Field. My 8-year-old son - adopted at birth by my boyfriend and me - loves the M’s almost as much as he hates the way a breaking news story can keep me late at work. He would never have forgiven me for skipping the game.
I didn’t feel too bad about missing the meetings. Washington’s high court rejected same-sex marriage for much the same reason the New York Court of Appeals did earlier this month. The speeches in Seattle would no doubt be similar to those made in New York, and I didn’t need to hear them again.
Basically, both courts found that marriage is like a box of Trix: It’s for kids.
In New York, the court ruled in effect that irresponsible heterosexuals often have children by accident - we gay couples, in contrast, cannot get drunk and adopt in one night - so the state can reserve marriage rights for heterosexuals in order to coerce them into taking care of their offspring. Without the promise of gift registries and rehearsal dinners, it seems, many more newborns in New York would be found in trash cans.
At least the New York court acknowledged that many same-sex couples have children. Washington’s judges went out of their way to make ours disappear, finding that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.” Children, the decision continues, “tend to thrive in families consisting of a father, mother and their biological children.’’
A concurring opinion gave the knife a few leisurely twists: due to the “binary biological nature of marriage,” it read, only opposite-sex couples are capable of “responsible child rearing.”
These stunning statements fly in the face of the evidence about gay and lesbian parents presented to the court. Similar evidence persuaded the high court in Arkansas to overturn that state’s ban on gay and lesbian foster parents.
What the New York and Washington opinions share - besides a willful disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions - is a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.
Even if gay couples who adopt are more stable, as New York found, don’t their children need the security and protections that the court believes marriage affords children? And even if heterosexual sex is essential to the survival of the human race (a point I’m willing to concede), it’s hard to see how preventing gay couples from marrying increases heterosexual activity. (“Keep breeding, heterosexuals,” the Washington State Supreme Court in effect shouted, “To bed! To bed! To bed!”) Both courts have found that my son’s parents have no right to marry, but what of my son’s right to have married parents?
A perverse cruelty characterizes both decisions. The courts ruled, essentially, that making my child’s life less secure somehow makes the life of a child with straight parents more secure. Both courts found that making heterosexual couples stable requires keeping homosexual couples vulnerable. And the courts seemed to agree that heterosexuals can hardly be bothered to have children at all - or once they’ve had them, can hardly be bothered to care for them - unless marriage rights are reserved exclusively for heterosexuals. And the religious right accuses gays and lesbians of seeking “special rights.”
Even if you believe that marriage plays a special role in the lives of heterosexuals with children (another point I’m happy to concede), can it not play a similar role in the lives of homosexual couples, whether they’re parents or not? Marriage, after all, is not reserved for couples with children. (Perhaps it will be soon, if courts keep heading in this direction.)
When my widowed grandfather remarried in his 60’s, he wasn’t seeking to further the well-being of his children, who were grown and out of the house. He was seeking the security, companionship and legal rights that marriage provides. The survival of humankind was the furthest thing from his mind.
These defeats have demoralized supporters of gay marriage, but I see a silver lining. If heterosexual instability and the link between heterosexual sex and human reproduction are the best arguments opponents of same-sex marriage can muster, I can’t help but feel that our side must be winning. Insulting heterosexuals and discriminating against children with same-sex parents may score the other side a few runs, but these strategies won’t win the game.
So I’m confident that one day my son will live in a country that allows his parents to marry. His parents are already married, as far as he’s concerned, as my boyfriend and I tied the knot in Canada more than a year and a half ago. We recognize, even if the courts do not, that it’s in his best interest for us to be married.
And while Wednesday was a dark day, the M’s beat the Blue Jays 7 to 4, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Amend It to End It
A Risky Amendment Could Stop the Emerging Anti-Gay-Adoption Movement in Its Tracks
by Dan Savage
My son had a fever, and it was spiking-103, 104, 105. The nurse on the phone told us to fill a tub with cold water, dump in whatever ice we had in the freezer, and set him in the bath to break his fever. Five minutes later we were standing in the bathroom, empty ice trays in the sink, watching the tub slowly fill with cold water. I didn't have the heart to do it-I couldn't just set my feverish, distraught son into a tub full of ice water. So I did what any decent parent would do: I got undressed, stepped into the tub first, and sat down. Then my boyfriend handed our son to me. We sat there together, ice cubes floating around us, my son's thin, warm arms wrapped around my neck, until his fever broke.
My partner and I adopted eight years ago. Like any other couple who wants to adopt, we had to earn the right to sit in tubs filled with ice water-and catch vomit in our cupped hands, enjoy week-long sleep-deprivation marathons, and all the other perks of parenthood. We had to open our financial records for inspection, submit to criminal background checks, and welcome social workers into our heads. When the time came, the courts in the state where we adopted treated us like any other couple, allowing us to do one expensive joint adoption rather than two twice-as-expensive single-parent adoptions.
At the time we adopted, only one state-Florida-banned adoptions by same-sex couples. Now it is illegal in half a dozen states, and if the American Taliban gets its way, soon it will be illegal in more. USA Today reported in February that religious conservatives, emboldened by their successful efforts to pass anti-gay-marriage laws and get anti-gay-marriage amendments approved in dozens of states, are planning to push for bans on adoptions by same-sex couples.
"Now that we have defined what marriage is, we need to take that further and say children deserve to be in that relationship," Greg Quinlan, a conservative activist, told USA Today. Anti-gay-adoption laws are being "drafted or discussed," according to USA Today, in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia.
And in Oregon too, the state where my boyfriend and I adopted our son, the state that eight years ago treated us like any other couple.
The arguments social conservatives use against adoptions by same-sex couples are every bit as dishonest as the arguments they employ against same-sex marriage. They point to studies that show children with married parents do better than those with single parents (ignoring the fact that these studies measure the benefits of having two parents, not two opposite-sex parents), and they refuse to acknowledge the existence of numerous studies that show children raised by same-sex couples do just as well as children raised by heterosexual couples.
Perhaps most infuriating, opponents of adoptions by gay and lesbian couples seek to create the impression that there is a home-a heterosexual home-for every child waiting to be adopted. All children deserve, the religious right argues, a mother and a father. It's a blandly appealing nod to normalcy that masks an insidious insult: When it comes to adoption, any heterosexual couple-any heterosexual couple at all, however dysfunctional-is preferable to even the healthiest homosexual couple. All same-sex couples are, by definition, unfit to parent.
The right has been allowed to frame this debate thus far, but I believe we can reframe it by demanding that any effort to outlaw adoptions by same-sex couples be followed to its logical conclusion. If gays and lesbians are unfit to parent any children we might adopt, then we are surely unfit to parent the children we have already adopted. We should demand that any bill banning adoptions by same-sex couples include a provision that would require the state to remove children from the homes of same-sex couples. Adopted or biological, if the state believes that gays and lesbians are unfit parents, how can they leave the kids we're already parenting in our homes?
It's difficult to know exactly how many American children are being brought up by same-sex couples; estimates range from anywhere between 250,000 and 10,000,000. But we know how many children there are in foster care in the United States: 500,000. The foster-care system is universally acknowledged to be bankrupt and broken, so dysfunctional that it amounts to state-regulated child abuse. There aren't enough prospective parents-single, married, gay, straight-willing to adopt the kids who are currently in foster care, much less the hundreds of thousands or millions of children who would be added if the state were forced to find homes for all the children currently being raised by gay and lesbian couples.
If such a provision were attached to anti-gay-adoption laws, the religious right would no longer be able to argue about what is or isn't in the best interests of hypothetical children who may or may not be adopted in the future, but rather what's in the best interest of real children, children who have already been adopted, children who already have homes and parents. The debate would shift from how hypothetical children might do in our homes to how our real children are currently doing in our homes-and studies show they're doing fine, thank you very much. My proposed amendment to anti-same-sex-adoption laws would instantly deprive religious conservatives of their emotionally manipulative every-child-deserves-a-mother-and-a-father argument.
Instead they would be required to make a much tougher argument: that a potential lifetime in a dysfunctional foster-care system-older children are notoriously hard to place for adoption-would be better for my child than the life my partner and I are giving him. They would have to argue that it would be in my son's best interest to be taken from the father who sits in ice water with him when he has a fever and from the father who takes him to school every day. The religious right would have to argue in favor of taking everything that belongs to him from our home-his skateboard, his football, his first- and second-grade schoolwork, his beloved one-eyed dog. In addition to taking my son from his parents, the religious right would have to argue for taking him from his grandparents, his aunts, his uncles, his cousins, his friends, his teachers, his babysitter.
It is an argument they would lose.