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James A. Smith, Sr.
Executive Editor
It was impossible to miss talk show host Rosie O’Donnell’s March 14 "coming out" celebration on Disney-owned ABC television and the torrent of news media coverage that followed. In a heavily promoted special two-hour "Primetime Thursday" broadcast, as well as generous excerpts on "Good Morning America" and "World News Tonight," O’Donnell announced to an unsurprised world that she is "gay."
Why did she feel it necessary to make clear her sexual preference now before the scheduled conclusion of her talk show program in May? Because she had found her "mission" in life: helping to repeal Florida’s law prohibiting homosexuals from adopting children. O’Donnell maintains a part-time Florida residence in Miami Beach and has adopted three children in another state.
The massive media attention for O’Donnell is part of a well-funded, Madison Avenue public relations campaign orchestrated by the American Civil Liberties Union with the compliant, fawning assistance of secular media, especially ABC News. Disney’s broadcast network promoted the "Primetime Thursday" broadcast as a "special event" and sympathetically titled it, "Rosie’s story: For the sake of the children."
So much for objective journalism.
The campaign, which also included a March 14 Miami press conference, follows last month’s much trumpeted policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics approving of homosexual adoptions (for more, see Feb. 28 Florida Baptist Witness). The ACLU claims to have generated from the campaign’s website (www.lethimstay.com) 80,000 e-mail messages to Gov. Jeb Bush, 10,000 from Florida, urging repeal of Florida’s law. The governor’s office told Associated Press it had received less than 40,000 messages, with nearly 4,000 from Florida residents.
The ACLU’s campaign suffered a setback in August when Miami’s U.S. District Judge Lawrence King upheld Florida’s 24-year-old law. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta will hear an appeal later this year.
"Given that there is no fundamental right to adopt or to be adopted, there can be no fundamental right to apply for adoption," King ruled. "The Supreme Court has warned against expanding fundamental rights because once a fundamental right is identified, the matter is placed ‘outside the arena of public debate and legislative action.’"
Precisely correct! The people, through their elected representatives, have the right to determine the proper qualifications for those who would adopt children under the state’s care. Since the ACLU cannot attain its policy before Florida’s elected officials, it is now seeking relief in the courts — a well-worn strategy for liberals to achieve their public policy goals.
ABC News’ virtually one-sided portrayal of this critical issue failed to take seriously common sense and sound public policy reasons why homosexuals should not be permitted to adopt children. Ken Connor, a Floridian and president of Family Research Council, recently noted several valid reasons:
- Homosexual adoptions teach that marriage is temporary and based on sex.
- Sexual relationships aren’t based on procreation but on pleasure.
- Monogamy is not the norm for homosexuals.
Connor notes that such reputable journals as Developmental Psychology, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Child Psychology and Human Development have published articles demonstrating the negative effects of homosexual parenting.
The other side trots out their own bevy of surveys seeming to indicate that there is no harm in homosexual parenting.
As I mentioned in my editorial last month, two experts in the field of quantitative analysis evaluated 49 empirical studies on same-sex parenting that seem to prove that there is no difference in children raised by homosexuals. In No Basis: What The Studies Don’t Tell Us About Same-Sex Parenting, Althea Nagai and Robert Lerner found that every study contained at least one fatal research flaw. Nagai and Lerner argue "no generalizations can reliably be made based on any of these studies. For these reasons the studies are no basis for good science or good public policy." (For more, see: http://marriagelaw.cua.edu/No_Basis.htm.)
Rather than the best interest of children, this campaign is about the selfish interests of homosexuals who demand the right to adopt for the purpose of providing further validation to their sexual lifestyle. "I have every right to parent this child," O’Donnell told Diane Sawyer. "I don’t think America knows what a gay parent looks like. I am the gay parent."
It’s tragic that children under the care of the state are being used to advance a political agenda. How can "the sake of children" be truly considered when O’Donnell, who lost her mother when she was 10 and had a "not very available" father, is raising children in a fatherless environment by design?
The biblical model for parenting is within the lifetime marital covenant between a man and a woman. It’s not too much to insist on this ideal as the state seeks to care for children. For the sake of the children, Florida Baptists should urge Sunshine State officials to maintain and vigorously defend the law banning same-sex adoptions.