With myriad reasons to hate my home state, I find myself taking this one most personally. It's bad enough that adoption - in these peoples' eyes - has devolved from another respected life choice to the
"abandoned kids store." But now the same people who consider children available for adoption as rejects want to
still protect these rejects from those evil homosexuals. Some culture of life, don't you think? From the
Associated Press:
Religious conservatives who succeeded in rewriting Ohio's constitution to ban same-sex marriage are pushing state lawmakers to make divorce more difficult and to ban gay people from becoming foster or adoptive parents.
The issues were priorities listed in a lobbying day by several groups last month. "The conservative Christian community feels more empowered today than in the recent past," said Sen. Jay Hottinger, who introduced a bill creating "covenant marriage" last week. "The momentum they sense they have, they want to make certain it doesn't go away."
[snip]
The effort to ban gay people from adopting or becoming foster parents hasn't gotten as far. Greg Quinlan, president of the Ohio Pro-Family Network, has proposed the idea to state Rep. Tim Schaffer, a Lancaster Republican whose office says he's still studying the issue.
A bill banning gay foster parents passed the Texas House, and a similar bill is pending in Tennessee. "It certainly helps our case in Ohio to have other states who have done or are doing it," said Quinlan, who describes himself as a former homosexual.
Downing said banning gays from adopting and foster parenting would drive people and businesses away from Ohio. State Rep. Bill Seitz, who sponsored the gay marriage law but said the constitutional amendment was too vaguely worded, said he supports covenant marriage because it's voluntary. But he's "not too wild about" the adoption ban. "To categorically say that children who may need to be adopted cannot be adopted by an unmarried person or a same-sex couple, I think is probably going farther than we need to go until all the kids who need to get adopted, get adopted," he said.
Did you catch what Quinlan said? He describes himself as a former homosexual. Why wasn't this idiot instantly discredited because of that statement? I don't know of any former African Americans or former Latinos out there, do you? If he wanted to see how well having homosexual parents can work out, all Quinlan had to do was pick up a copy of the
Cincinnati Enquirer yesterday to read about Cincinnati Red Joe Valentine, the child of two women.