On a recent road trip through the Sierra Nevada Mountains my husband turned to me and quietly asked "If we could have done it when we were younger, would you have wanted to adopt a child?" Without hesitating, I answered yes. He gave me his smile that told me we know each other all too well. We drove on in thoughtful silence.
Brian and I are getting on in years now. I'm 52, he's 48. This January we will count 20 years together. If you count the rings on that tree, we could have not only been parents, but grandparents by now.
Over the course of the years, I have let my mind's eye picture a child in our lives. Would we have had the patience required? The strength of character to be good role models, to provide a good home and be givers of emotional and financial stability?
As I look back on our life together, I can honestly answer yes. We would have made good parents to a child in need of a good home.
The thing is, society during those years answered those questions for us with a judgmental and unyielding "don't even think about it." The lies that were told, the campaign waged against us warned that we weren't fit to be in the presence of a child, let alone raise one. Decent people bought this lie being sold by profiteers of shameful pandering.
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When Brian and I met and fell in love in 1995, we did so in the city of San Francisco, where gay people were speaking out, fighting the scourge of AIDS and at the same time gaining clout as a political force nationwide. It was a heady time for activists as we began to show solid proof to Americans that nothing but blind bigotry kept us from enjoying the constitutional protections our country was said to guarantee us. Still, adoption for gay couples was something that, for the sake of political expediency, had to remain on the back burner.
It wouldn't be until 2003 that same-sex couples could legally adopt in the State of California. A year later, Brian and I would buy a home in the burbs and build an honest to goodness white picket fence. Just four years later we would be legally wed. By the time we had our first serious discussion about adoption, we realized that we would be in our 60s when the child would graduate high school. We had missed our window.
And here we are today. We have showered our love and money on our many wonderful dogs over the years and they have been true members of our family. But we've never known what it was like to help them learn to ride a bike or panic when one of them asks for the keys to our car for the very first time.
No, it's not the same.
There is a reason I get a lump in my throat when I watch reruns of The Andy Griffith Show and his love for Opie. That picture was denied us without legal complications and societal disapproval and it has left something of a hole that I wish I had had the right to choose to fill for myself.
The argument the Christian right has presented to the courts against the LGBT community has framed it as an assault on the family. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our fight has always been about forming families. Our own families, without interference from people who have prejudged us and our ability to comb a child's hair without a lurid ulterior motive.
And still this humiliating fight goes on. While the media focuses its eye on our demand for a nationwide ruling that allows us our freedom to marry the person we love, we are also battling the same authoritarians who are fighting even harder to prevent our right to form families that include children. It isn't as headline grabbing as our demand for marriage equality, but in many individual ways, it is even more important.
State laws across the land are a judicial disaster when it comes to the question of same sex parents. The arbitrary decisions made in family courts are still guided by animus despite constitutional law. For the children, we need to bring the issue of parenting rights to the fore as adamantly as we have demanded our right to marry. We aren't doing it to piss anyone off or deliberately harm children. This is about the children and their families.
We don't see our young friends Ian and Mark as much as we used to. In 2007, a year before their own marriage took place, they adopted a beautiful baby girl. Lilly is in first grade now. Their lives have grown busy. They see she gets to ballet class and make sure she has her lunch before she catches her bus and they rush out the door to get to work on time. The last time we saw them was from Brian's office on Market Street last June, during the San Francisco Pride Parade. They were marching with PFLAG. We were four stories up when we spotted them, Lilly in a pink tutu hoisted on Mark's shoulders.
Even though they couldn't hear me above the celebration, I cheered myself hoarse for that beautiful family.