My friends Bill and Robert have been anxiously creeping their way through the Texas Child Protective Service’s training for foster parents. They could accept the idea that if, eventually, they wanted to adopt only one of them could legally do so (under current Texas law gay couples are prohibited from adopting as a unit). Fostering seemed like a good way to go given the need for stable, solid foster homes, and the fact that adoption is a five or six year process even for heterosexual couples when pursued through the state.
Now they can’t even do that.
Yet again, while screaming about how liberals, gays, and lesbians “push” their values into schools and churches and public discourse, some conservative Christian state Representative in Texas has done just that: pushed his views to the forefront. This thinking, self-aware soul who has only the welfare of children in mind introduced a rider to a funding bill that would ban gay foster parents, and not just new gay foster parents. Gay and lesbian foster parents with current placements, some of them long-term, will now have to have their children removed from their homes. Because, as you know, upheaval is so good for children who may already have emotional and psychological issues with abandonment.
“Texas House endorses ban on gay foster parents”: html or pdf
How the hell are we, gay men and lesbians, supposed to live like this?
Oh, wait, we aren’t. We’re supposed to curl up and die, or worse, go straight and live a lie, lying to ourselves, lying to our partners, lying to any children such a relationship might produce.
Yeah, ’cause compulsive dishonesty is so much better for the soul and the moral fabric of the universe than being queer.
Tell me how this can be fought? Tell me how I’m not supposed to just start smoking some cigarettes and shooting everyone? Tell me, exactly, how I’m supposed to “turn the other cheek” and keep giving a shit about the fate of humanity as a whole?
Tell me…somebody…please