There were a lot of novel concepts
floating around Tuesday’s
meeting of the House Judiciary Committee. Or maybe not so novel. Maybe our narrow world really has been expanding and I just haven’t been paying attention. Whatever the case, it was heartening to see a group of lawmakers paying attention, not merely hearing the voices of experience but listening to what they had to say. Our reporter Laura Kellams was on hand to chronicle the discussion. Joyce Williams Warren, a judge for more than 20 years, presides over family court in Pulaski and Perry counties, so it’s a given that she knows whereof she speaks when she says that good foster parents are hard to find. (It might be argued that good parents, period, are hard to find, because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many children in need of foster care, but that’s another topic for another day. ) On this day, she was making the case for lawmakers to withhold an endorsement of Senate Bill 959, which, if enacted, would prohibit gays and lesbians from adopting or being named foster parents. The bill, she said, would serve no useful purpose because of the dearth of foster parents in general.
According to Kellams’ story, nearly 4, 000 are in the state’s care at this time, but only about half of those are assigned to foster care. Of the others, some are with relatives or prospective families, under medical care or in group homes. And some are in, of all things, emergency shelters. Currently, about 300 youngsters are up for adoption.
Little wonder, then, that Warren came out against limiting the state’s options.
“I’m not concerned about a person’s marital status or sexual orientation, even when it comes to parents,” she told the committee. “I am concerned about a person’s character, integrity, willingness... committing wholeheartedly to parent that child.”
One shouldn’t be so rash as to say that these traits aren’t of concern to the proponents of SB 959. From their standpoint, or at least from the standpoint of the more vocal critics of homosexual households, things like good character and integrity go hand in hand with morality, but homosexuality is immoral and immoral people shouldn’t be sanctioned as parental figures.
Quite a few witnesses were on hand Tuesday to decry that way of thinking, among them self–described human rights activist Annie Abrams of Little Rock.
“Being heterosexual doesn’t give you a Good Housekeeping seal that you’ll be a good parent,” she told the committee (as the scores of trouble youngsters who each year pass through the state’s juvenile justice and social services systems attest, I might add ).
That’s not how the state Child Welfare Agency Review Board saw it during Mike Huckabee’s time as governor. In 1999, it prohibited children from being entrusted to the care of anyone whose household included a gay or lesbian adult. In other words, mere proximity was banned.
A trial court took issue with that stance, as did the Arkansas Supreme Court.
“The driving force behind adoption of the regulation was not to promote the health, safety and welfare of foster children, but rather based upon the board’s view of morality and its bias against homosexuals,” the court opined in a unanimous decision. As a result of that view and that bias, the high court ruled in upholding the lower court ruling, the board had overstepped the authority entrusted to it by the Arkansas General Assembly by trying to regulate “public morality.”
By the way, the court also pointed out that the state previously had allowed gays and lesbians to serve as foster parents and during the course of the litigation did not cite any instances in which any child’s health, safety or welfare had ever been endangered as a result of that policy.
Some proponents, even less enthusiastic ones like Gov. Mike Beebe, are of the opinion that children reared by gays or lesbians will suffer antagonism and ostracism at the hands of their peers on that basis alone, but a 15-year-old boy who is being reared by his mother and her lesbian partner testified otherwise. He told lawmakers that “people look at me as just a regular person from another family.”
During the local public radio station’s coverage of the committee hearing, I heard a teen-age girl say much the same thing about her classmates. Attitudes can be slow to change. Convictions are even more intractable. Still, it’s a hopeful sign that the House Judiciary Committee failed to recommend passage of SB 959. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that institutionalized bigotry in Arkansas suffered a much-needed blow as a result of it.
—–––––•–––––—Associate Editor Meredith Oakley is editor of the Voices page.
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