Suffer the Children

Conservative voters in yet another state, Arkansas, have decided to push for an amendment to ensure that more foster children will remain wards of the state, as they seek to bar same-sex and unmarried opposite-sex couples from becoming foster or adoptive parents. "What we are doing is, we are protecting the welfare of children,” Jerry Cox, president of the Family Council Action Committee, said at a news conference at the state Capitol. Arkansas’s Child Welfare Agency Review Board had established a policy in 1999 that banned gay people from serving as foster parents, and the Arkansas Supreme Court struck it down after a seven-year legal battle between the state and the ACLU. In its unanimous ruling, the court said testimony in the state's appeal demonstrated that "the driving force behind adoption of the regulations was not to promote the health, safety and welfare of foster children but rather based upon the board's views of morality and its bias against homosexuals."* Not surprisingly, it was this very same group of narrow-minded bigots that was largely responsible for the amendment banning gay marriage in Arkansas.

Perhaps Mr. Cox can explain to the children desperately wanting a loving family and a stable home life why he is willing to sacrifice their future happiness only to further his own dogma of hate. I’m sure they would be eager to ignore all the research and studies that have proven same-sex couples to be just as loving, caring and capable of providing excellent childcare, simply to further Mr. Cox’s own ambitions for power. I’m sure the foster children would be happy growing up in state care as long as homosexuals can be forced to remain second-class citizens in a supposedly classless society, where all people are supposedly equal in the eyes of the law. It is nice to think Cox has all this time and energy to devote to his pursuit of the Nazi ideal of a pure society, free of undesirables, but is it possible his resources could be put to better use in other ways?

Maybe more time spent finding a solution to the ridiculous heterosexual divorce rate would be a good place to start. Once he has solved that problem, the perhaps his organization would be willing to adopt all the foster children in the state so they might be raised in a loving “god-fearing” home. If not that, then perhaps those conservative churches would be willing to forego their tax-exempt status in order to offset the burden of the taxpayers who have to shoulder the financial responsibility of educating and providing medical care to these children. Maybe they should also keep in mind that these children are the result of heterosexual sex, not from same-sex unions. Or maybe, in a fit of honesty, the FCAC will own up to their blatant hypocrisy and admit they could care less about the welfare of the children, but rather it is their own prejudices they value so dearly.

*Excerpt from article from 365gay.com