by Anne Moody
I hoped that Trevor’s and Amanda’s enthusiasm about John and Kelly and the fact that they now wanted to voluntarily relinquish their parental rights would seem like a positive development to the state caseworker. But she was unfamiliar with private adoption and was understandably cautious. John and Kelly’s attorney—a past president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys—and I did our best to educate the caseworker’s office about private adoption, to allay their suspicions, and to encourage them to feel the sense of urgency we felt about getting this child to her adoptive parents as quickly as possible. Even so, the placement took more than two months to accomplish, instead of the two weeks the other adoption had taken—much too long a time in the life of a seven-month-old and the family waiting for her. But I know from my own experience in working for DSHS in Michigan that the process must have seemed like a nerve-wracking whirlwind to the caseworker, who didn’t understand that our approach was every bit as legal and ethical as an adoption handled by the state.
I had had a much more discouraging experience several years earlier when I tried to work with the foster care system in another state on behalf of a family from Washington. They were an exceptional family and, a number of years earlier, had adopted a child with developmental delays caused by a rare medical condition, who was now thriving in their home. The adoptive mother, in particular, was a tremendous advocate for all of her children, and she left no stone unturned in finding the best resources for her son with special needs. One day, she called to tell me that she had seen a registry of waiting children from another state that included a little boy with very similar special needs to those of her own child and to ask if I would investigate the situation for her.
I called the child’s caseworker, discovered that they were indeed looking for an adoptive home for him, and told her that I would like to send her information about this particular family to consider along with other applicants. We had a long conversation in which she agreed that they seemed like a good family for this child since they were not only experienced parents but were already knowledgeable about how to care for a child with his particular needs. So, I sent her their home study, and then we waited. I had warned the family that it would probably be a slow and frustrating process to work within the state system, but I had not anticipated how thoroughly infuriating and ultimately defeating things would become.
The first sign of trouble came about a month after my initial conversation with the caseworker, when she informed me that although my prospective adoptive family was obviously well qualified to parent this child, they could not be considered until every family that lived in her state had been eliminated as a possibility. My clients were saddened by this news and wondered why it had never been mentioned before, but felt they still had a chance since the caseworker had let them know that there weren’t likely to be many families as well qualified to parent this child as they were. Several more months went by, with me periodically calling to check on the status of things with the caseworker and, more frequently, receiving calls from the adoptive mom who needed to express her amazement and annoyance at the situation. Finally, in the fourth month, my family was informed that they were out of the running because the child couldn’t be placed out of state. An appropriate in-state family hadn’t been found yet, but they would just have to keep looking.
My first reaction to this news was anger on behalf of my family. Why had they been so misinformed and allowed to spend four months thinking about this child and imagining him as their own when that had apparently never even been a possibility? Then I got angry on behalf of the three-year-old boy who could and should have had the opportunity to become part of a family that was uniquely qualified to care for him but instead was going to remain in foster care even longer because of some arbitrary restriction on the pool of people who were eligible to become his parents.
Although I was given no further information about exactly why this state didn’t like to send kids out of state, it seemed likely that their reasoning for this policy had nothing to do with the best interests of the child. Instead, I suspect it was about funding or possibly avoiding placement statistics that would make that state look bad. When the caseworker finally met with her “higher-ups” to discuss an out-of-state placement, they must have informed her that it couldn’t happen, at least not without a much longer effort to find an in-state family. The whole thing was a sad waste of time and emotion for my family. But the one who really suffered was the child who was under the “care” of a child welfare system that could somehow justify putting the urgency of his need for a family second to its own need to adhere to policy.
I don’t blame that caseworker for not understanding that she couldn’t place this child out of state even when there was no family ready to adopt him in state. Policies like that are beyond understanding.
Things went better for Trevor and Amanda’s baby. Several months after the placement, the adoptive family and I visited with the birth family. They had asked that we meet at a local shopping mall and said they were planning to bring along some relatives. I had learned a bit more about the extended family from the DSHS worker during the intervening months and was concerned that these extra family members who wanted to be at the visit might be the ones who were frequently in and out of jail. John and Kelly were nervous as well, but wanted to go ahead as planned and not put any limitations on how many people could be at the visit.
As it turned out, my fears were unfounded. There were a few extra people there in addition to Trevor and Amanda, the grandmother, and some small cousins, but everyone was wonderfully gracious. They treated John and Kelly and their girls like family celebrities. There was a great deal of oohing and ahhing over how darling the baby was, how much she’d grown, what a great big sister Olivia was, and how grateful everyone was to John and Kelly. For their part, John and Kelly thanked Trevor, Amanda, and the grandmother repeatedly, assuring them that they would do everything in their power to give this child a wonderful life.
The only awkward moment came when Amanda cheerfully announced that she had just discovered that she was pregnant again.
Six months later, Trevor called, this time from a small town in Oregon. He told me that he and Amanda had moved there hoping for a fresh start and hoping to avoid the Washington caseworker in their hometown when the new baby was born. But he was worried. He believed that she had already alerted the authorities in Oregon because a Child Protective Services worker had come to their home that morning. He wanted me to tell him what to do to keep the authorities away, and I told him the best thing they could do would be to take good care of the baby. Trevor seemed to feel that that was good advice and a workable plan, and the call ended with each of us wishing the other well. I haven’t heard from him again.
V
Changes
28
A Battle for Gay Adoption
“Don’t ask, don’t tell” was a well-established (if unstated) policy in the adoption world long before the phrase became widely known with respect to members of the military during the Clinton administration. The “don’t ask” part of working with gay or lesbian clients in the 1980s and early 1990s was tremendously easy because the concept of gay and lesbian adoptive parenthood was almost completely unacknowledged by society during the early years of my work with adoptive families. As incredible as it sounds now, there weren’t even all that many individuals who were comfortably “out” to their own families or in their professional lives. Most adoption agencies, many of which were religiously affiliated, either had strict policies against working with gay and lesbian clients or considered the idea so far off the radar that no policy was necessary. Most private agencies didn’t even accept applications from single parents, thereby imagining that they were eliminating the problem of sexual orientation altogether. When agencies did work with single parents, female applicants, often with “roommates,” were under no suspicion. Single men, almost never with “roommates,” w
ere effectively considered guilty (of unspecified moral failings) until proven innocent. They were routinely asked to provide evidence of psychological screening far beyond the normal home study requirements, and were viewed with caution if not outright suspicion.
The “don’t tell” side of the coin was especially problematic—and in some ways exceeded even the daunting ethical and psychological ramifications essentially ordering soldiers to live a lie during their military service. In order to be approved for adoptive parenthood, gay or lesbian applicants had to misrepresent themselves throughout the home study process—a demeaning, frustrating, infuriating, depressing, and logistically difficult exercise. During a time when they should have been focusing on the busy, joyful anticipation of parenthood, they were forced to create guarded relationships not only with the professionals guiding them through the adoption process but with society in general. There was no way for them to anticipate where outrage might come from, and no predicting how an adoption agency that officially didn’t know about the applicant’s sexual orientation would respond if it was revealed after the child’s placement. This was an era in which gay and lesbian biological parents sometimes lost primary custody of their children after a divorce simply because of their sexual orientation; and if a biological parent could not feel secure in his or her parenthood, adoptive parents certainly could not.
The situation was further complicated by the fact that the adoptive parent who didn’t mention his or her sexual orientation during the home study interview was being less than forthcoming—grounds for invalidating the home study as a reliable assessment of the applicant’s suitability for adoption. If dishonesty could be proven after an adoption had been completed, an agency could claim breach of contract and ask that it be overturned. Mercifully, this didn’t seem to happen often, in part because these families avoided working with clearly homophobic agencies.
But, more significantly, adoption professionals working with gay and lesbian applicants, having gotten to know them firsthand, ended up advocating for them regardless of whether they recognized or acknowledged the adoptive parent’s sexual orientation. Even in those unenlightened times, many gay and lesbian parents successfully adopted, and in the process, slowly but surely raised the consciousness of adoption professionals. Social workers who completed post-placement reports observed the successes for both parents and children, and they turned (sometimes much to their own amazement) into champions of gay adoption. But they were generally very quiet champions, as much of mainstream society still regarded gay and lesbian adoptive parenthood as problematic, if not taboo.
Because gay and lesbian parents were adopting as single parents, they typically could not expect to adopt healthy infants, who were in short supply even for two-parent families. Instead, many pursued parenthood through the state, so their children often came from the foster care system. These kids were typically considered hard to place due to age, special needs, or other complications, and there was only a small pool of available prospective adoptive parents who were willing and able to take on the challenges they posed. The number of able and willing parents was considerably smaller than the number of kids needing homes—hence the state’s willingness to welcome single-parent applicants. Rather than adhere to an across-the-board preference for two-parent families, caseworkers for some of the children in state care actually requested single parents, typically when a child’s history of abuse made bonding with an opposite-sex parent problematic. For these and other reasons, including changes in state antidiscrimination laws, the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services found itself on the forefront of what was coming to be called “gay adoption.”
It was in this context that I was contacted by a gay couple, Joe and Alex, who were trying to do an in-country adoption. They were actively involved in a local adoption support group for same-sex parents and were well informed about their options, including the possibility of adopting a child from the state foster care system. They had learned of a four-year-old boy in state custody whose birth mother had had considerable difficulty parenting and had decided to relinquish her rights and allow the little boy to be adopted.
Happily for Joe and Alex, the Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) was open to the possibility of placing this child, who had some special needs, with a same-sex couple. While there already were numerous gay and lesbian adoptive parents by this time, this degree of openness from a state agency about such a placement was not at all the norm. Official policies and unofficial practices varied widely from state to state (and, no doubt, even from caseworker to caseworker), but it is safe to say that there were many average citizens in the mid-1990s who would have been surprised to hear that the state sanctioned gay and lesbian adoptive parenthood. Even strong supporters of these families were a bit surprised that the state was taking this stance.
Predictably, there was a group of citizens who were not only surprised but outraged when they discovered what DSHS was doing. And their leader was a ferocious character named Lon Mabon who, in 1986, had founded a group called the Oregon Citizen Alliance (OCA), a conservative Christian political activist organization. Originally focused on ousting the Democratic U.S. senator from Oregon at the time, the group continued to be involved in Oregon politics through the next decade. A primary goal was to repeal the governor’s order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, an effort that was approved by the voters, 52.7 percent to 47.3 percent, in 1988. In 1992, the OCA attempted to go even further to prevent what it termed “special rights” for homosexuals by adding a provision that the state “recognized homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism and masochism as abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse.”1 This time, not only did the voters defeat the measure, 56 percent to 44 percent, but also the Oregon Court of Appeals declared the earlier vote, known as Measure 8, unconstitutional.
So Lon Mabon was upset in 1993, and when he learned of a pending adoption by a gay couple in Washington, he launched an all-out media war focused on turning the birth mother into an undeserving victim of Washington State.
The birth mother was a young woman who had a long, troubling history of problems with drinking and petty crime and was well-known to juvenile authorities years before she showed up on the national talk-show circuit at age twenty-two. She had given birth to her son when she was eighteen, and he had spent most of his life in foster homes. When the child was three, the birth mother decided to relinquish her parental rights. By that time, she had gotten married, and she and her husband had a five-month-old daughter. It is not clear why the birth mother felt capable of raising her daughter and incapable of raising her son; it may have been because of his special needs.
After the birth mother relinquished her parental rights, the DSHS caseworker began searching for a suitable adoptive home for the now four-year-old child. There were a number of applicants, including Joe and Alex, who eventually rose to the top of the list. The caseworker arranged for them to begin visiting with the little boy, and the three of them began forming a bond.
Everything was going well until someone who was upset about the idea of DSHS placing a child with a gay couple alerted the Rutherford Foundation, a conservative religious-rights group based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Outrage ensued, the media circus began, and Joe and Alex found their happy preparations for parenthood abruptly put on hold. They were both private people and hardly the type to seek the spotlight for any reason, let alone one so controversial and personal. It would have been much simpler, practically and legally, for them to decide not to get further involved in such a high-risk and now high-profile adoption. Joe and Alex had the option of telling the caseworker to withdraw their application so they could move on to adopt a child who didn’t come with these complications. But they chose not to walk away from the situation because they had already dared to believe that this child might become their own. For many adoptive parents, simply hearing the coming child’s name or seeing his or her picture for the first t
ime begins the attachment process.
Telling Joe and Alex to forget about this child at this point would have been like telling expectant biological parents to forget about this particular pregnancy and move on to the next.
Joe and Alex were about to find out how hard—and how weird—it is to take on the religious right. The Rutherford Foundation, with Lon Mabon as its spokesman, decided that the birth mother could be the perfect poster child for the national campaign they were waging against the LGBTQ community. In 1993, Washington was one of only six states that allowed same-sex parents to adopt, and the religious right was working aggressively to get the state’s laws changed. The birth mother’s situation as presented by the Rutherford media team—a now-reformed, formerly troubled young woman whose baby was stolen from her by the state and turned over to gay men—evoked sympathy, even outrage, and proved predictably irresistible to daytime television programmers.
Mabon’s team put her through a thorough makeover, with a new wardrobe, new hairdo, and new makeup—all of which aged her dramatically, somehow managing to make her look more like Dana Carvey’s famous Saturday Night Live Church Lady character than the young woman she actually was. The birth mother may not have looked anything like her actual self, but she was right out of central casting for the role of Wronged Mother. The role called for her to act devastated at the prospect of her son being snatched from her to be raised by gay men, and she dutifully told the various talk-show hosts and audiences that she wanted to have her son back in order to spare him this awful fate.
