Adoption-ban group seeks cash
Posted on Sunday, March 23, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/220565/
Little Rock’s Family Council Action Committee put out a call last week for help.
It came after the group’s president, Jerry Cox, reviewed fundraising reports for a coalition formed to defeat the Arkansas Adoption and Foster Care Act.
The proposed initiated act, sponsored by Cox’s group, would prohibit unmarried people who live with domestic partners from adopting children or becoming foster parents. The group working to defeat the measure, Arkansas Families First, has raised more money in the past month of operation than the Family Council has since July.
“If there was any doubt about our opposition making a fight of this, we know now that they will.... They’re already building a war chest to oppose us,” Cox wrote in an e- mailed fundraising letter.
Indeed, Arkansas Families First plans an orchestrated, statewide campaign to defeat the proposal, said Debbie Willhite, the campaign director.
“We need to put all our resources — people, money and communications — to making sure that when people vote on this initiative, they really know what the consequences will be,” Willhite said.
The group raised almost $ 32, 000 last month, compared with the Family Council’s sevenmonth cumulative total of about $ 22, 000.
Cox already had been expecting a tougher battle than the Family Council encountered in its successful 2004 effort to add a marriage definition to the state constitution.
That amendment passed by a 3-to-1 margin. Cox is framing this year’s proposal much like the 2004 campaign, saying it’s necessary in part to “blunt the political agenda” of gay activists. In his letter to supporters last week, he called Arkansas Families First a “pro-gay adoption group in Little Rock.”
But opponents aren’t going for it. They’re emphasizing the fact that the proposed law would force the state to turn down people, gay or straight, who would otherwise be qualified to adopt if they didn’t live with a domestic partner.
“This is an issue about chil- dren, about providing homes to the children who are most in need in this state,” said Rita Sklar, executive director of the Arkansas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. She’s a member of Arkansas Families First’s board.
While the coalition includes groups concerned about gay rights, it also includes groups such as Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, the Interfaith Council, the Arkansas Association of Social Workers, the American Academy of Pediatricians and the Arkansas Psychological Association.
“I would not call those gayrights groups,” Sklar said.
Arkansas Families First is working on a “decline to sign” campaign, asking people not to put their names on the petition to put the proposed initiated act on the Nov. 4 ballot.
The Family Council is making a major push in churches next month to gather petition signatures. To qualify the measure for the ballot, supporters must turn in 61, 974 signatures of registered Arkansas voters on the petition by July 7.
Willhite said she and other opponents know that it’s probably not realistic to keep the Family Council from gathering the minimum number of signatures, especially with plans to circulate petitions in Sunday School classes.
But they’re still trying to persuade people not to sign because the discussion always centers around what the proposal would do, she said. “They may still sign, but it never hurts to get people to understand what they’re doing,” Willhite said. The proposed act would prohibit the state from allowing any minor to be adopted or placed in foster care if the individual seeking to take in the child is “cohabiting with a sexual partner outside of a marriage which is valid under the Constitution and laws of this state.”
It would still allow a single person — gay or straight — who doesn’t live with a domestic partner to adopt or become a foster parent.
Only a handful of states have similar limitations, targeting homosexual couples, for example. Only Utah has one that bans adoption and foster care by unmarried couples.
So far no state besides Arkansas has a campaign to place a similar restriction on the ballot this year.
Willhite said the proposal would discriminate against children, “a part of our population that has no voice,” by limiting the number of people eligible to become their parents.
Cox said the proposal is about protecting children, however. He maintains that the attention called to the campaign will expand the pool of foster and adoptive parents in Arkansas.
The Family Council has distributed 2, 500 copies of a handbook outlining how to adopt or become a foster parent, and, Cox said, he ordered another 1, 000 copies last week. There’s no way to track how many people who sign up to adopt or foster children are doing so because of the Family Council’s efforts, he said.
If the proposal becomes law, it wouldn’t change the current state policy on foster care. The Arkansas Department of Human Services already has a policy that excludes cohabiting couples from serving as foster parents.
There is no similar restriction on adoptions, however, and the Family Council proposal would apply to private as well as statearranged adoptions.
In gathering money and signatures, the Family Council is leaning on the network it established in the marriage amendment campaign in 2004. In his fundraising letter, Cox put out a call to supporters to raise $ 30, 000 in 30 days, a little less than what Arkansas Families First raised in February.
The bulk of the $ 31, 975 that Families First raised last month came from two $ 10, 000 donations. They’re from the Fred Darragh Foundation of Little Rock, named for a founding member of the ACLU of Arkansas, and Family Equality Council, which describes itself as “a national advocacy organization committed to securing family equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer parents, guardians and allies.”
The largest donation to the Family Council Action Committee for this campaign has been from the Bible Church of Cabot at $ 2, 000.