The newly elected Republican governor of Florida, Charlie Crist, who will replace Jeb Bush starting on January 2, has been acting like a stealth Democrat with his appointments to state leadership posts. Between that and Marco Rubio, the new dynamic, young speaker of the Florida House promoting "citizen participation" and "government accountability", you’d think our state had been taken over by a bunch of progressives.
We Democrats here in Florida need to realize that the good old days of ranting about Jeb and his clueless brother are gone. If we are going to make any inroads in the 2008 election we need to start looking at policy issues and come up with some juicy wedge issues that will separate us from the Republicans.
Follow me over the fold for one possibility – repealing Florida’s ban on gay adoption.
Crist recently released his "100 Day Plan" for proposals he wants the new legislature to consider. The one item that caught my eye was:
Further down the list - but still on Crist's top tier - is a proposal to create an Office of Adoption and Child Protection within the governor's office, expanding the recently created Office of Child Abuse Prevention and appointing a chief child advocate. Among elements in the adoption initiative are state grants - as a candidate Crist proposed $3,000 to help adopting families.
Now, if you’ve been around for a while you probably remember Anita Bryant’s crusade against homosexuality in Miami back in the late 70’s. One of the results of that effort was that the state legislature passed a law banning gay adoptions in Florida.
From a website about adoption:
Many states do not allow adoptions by any unmarried couples, which automatically precludes same-sex couples from adopting in those states; and a few states – including Florida, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah and Virginia – have enacted laws that specifically bar gay individuals or couples from adopting.
This law was unsuccessfully challenged by a gay couple, Steven Lofton and Roger Croteau, who have since moved to Oregon. But their heroic effortsin taking in HIV positive and other unwanted children attracted national attention through Rosie O’Donnell’s championing of their case.
Rosie’s coming outas a lesbian parent in her televised interview with Diane Sawyer had the effect of making the idea of gay adoption acceptable to the general public. But the same-sex marriage backlash that the conservatives unleashed during the 2004 elections has dissipated some of that success.
In the campaign for governor last year this was an issuewhere there was a clear difference between the candidates. The Democrat Jim Davis supported repealing the gay adoption ban while Crist wanted to leave it in place.
Some conservatives think that gay adoption will save them at the ballot box in 2008 the way same-sex marriage did in 2004. Democrats need to make sure that idea backfires. There is already this:
But if gay marriage unites most conservatives in opposition, gay adoption does not. Already, there are splits among Republicans.
"This is not an issue about gays," says Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, a Republican, who was adopted as a child. "This is about children." Although he favored legislation to ban same-sex marriage in Ohio, he opposes the adoption bill and has no plans to schedule a hearing to discuss it.
Recent polling by Democratic consultant Peter Hart for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, also indicates the issue may not find favor among the general public. Asked about a constitutional amendment to ban adoptions by gays and lesbians, 58% of Missouri voters polled in November and 62% of Ohio voters this month said they would vote against it.
"Conservatives may well overreach if they try to ban gays from adopting children," Brookings Institution political analyst Thomas Mann says. "Americans have become more tolerant of same-sex relations, and this action may strike them as unnecessarily punitive."
This is the path that we need to keep to: If Charlie Crist is serious about promoting adoption he’ll repeal the ban.
What would really bring things to a head would be to get Bob Butterworth, a prominent Democrat that Crist recently appointed as the head of the state’s Department of Children and Families, to come out in favor of repealing the ban. That would probably put an end to Crist’s bipartisanship.
The professionals are already on the record:
And O'Donnell is hardly alone in her support of gay parenting. The Child Welfare League, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association have all recently issued statements in favor of gay adoption rights. Meanwhile, nine of the former legislators who helped pass Florida's adoption ban in 1977 said on March 8 [2002] that they were wrong to do so.
If we can rekindle this issue maybe other gay celebrities will take up the cause. This has definite possibilities. Florida Democrats care about child welfare! Repeal the ban!
[12-23-06 Update] Since writing this others have pointed out to me that for Florida Republicans to ban gay adoption is equivalent to saying that Social Services needs to take Mary Cheney's baby away from her and her partner when it's born. This is definitely topical!