LIBERADIO(!)

First, I have to say that Terry Frank is just cute as a button!

Pride - In the Name of Love

She also has very definite opinions against unmarried, sexually cohabiting couples (*wink, wink*) adopting, which she wrote about in the Tennessean on the day of the Tennessee Equality Project’s Advancing Equality Day on the Hill (personal stories from the day can be found here). The particular legislation she is in favor of – and TNEP president Chris Sanders is against – is SB0078, a bill which would would prevent all straight and gay unmarried, cohabiting couples from adopting children. In defense of this type of bill (which, after 31 years, was found to be unconstitutional in Florida), Terry provided a lot of evidence that supposedly proves that married couples can provide a more stable home for an adopted child. When asked in over at Post Politics where she got her information, she commented:

I’ll be happy to provide all of my multiple resources. With a strict 500 word limit, there is certainly no possible way to cite sources AND provide the opinion.

I’ll have them up on my site sometime today or tomorrow, depending on my work schedule.

You can then argue with the multiple studies.

That was two days ago and still no sources. I’m sure Terry is busy so I’ll break down for her what we’re looking for:

1. Proof that as “cohabitation has become an accepted and rising practice, so too have risen the economic, health, and criminal costs of such arrangements.”
2. The studies that show “cohabitation, same sex or heterosexual, has higher rates of dissolution than traditional marriage, as great as five times greater.”
3. The source that shows that occurrences of child abuse, child molestation, Poverty, Domestic violence are higher in cohabiting couples than in traditional marriage.
4. Proof that the fidelity rates of same-sex relationships are negligible compared to fidelity rates of 75-90 percent in heterosexual couples.
5. The stats that show that married, heterosexual relationships far exceed the duration of same sex couples, in fact dwarfing the duration of male homosexual relationships.

Oh, and if we’re going to compare apples to apples, we’d like to see all these for couples who have children. We’d also like to see them from studies done during this decade by non-partisan, secular institutions, like a university or the government.

I’m not sure what Terry is going to come up with but regardless, Tennessee has a process in place that is supposed to keep unfit people from adopting. If we really want to think of the welfare of the children, as Terry suggests, then we should pass legislation that would put more resources into the process itself. For instance, we could add more and better caseworkers who, rather than ferreting out “clandestine” sleeping arrangements, could more thoroughly asses the fitness of potential parents and produce a higher quality, and quantity, of follow up visits.

On Wednesday, the Tennessean ran a Op-ed by Leonard Pitts, a columnist for the Miami-Herald, in which he told the heartbreaking taleof a women who was kept from seeing her life partner for 8 hours after she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital. The woman was finally allowed into the room – just in time to see her loved one die. In describing the events, Pitts gives us some details of the life these two women shared. He wrote:

Politicians and alleged religious leaders have routinely invited us to hate gay people and call it morality. They have taught us to frame gay lives in cloudy abstracts of tradition and values. But this isn’t abstract, is it?

No, it is Janice and Lisa, meeting in college and falling in love, 20 years ago. It is a ”holy union” service in a local church, friends serving as maid of honor and ”best man.” ”We were dirt poor,” says Langbehn, “but we pulled it off.”

It is taking in foster kids no one else wants, drug babies, HIV babies, babies with fetal alcohol syndrome. It is adopting four of them and Lisa deciding she wants to be a stay-at-home mom and Janice saying OK, and wondering how the six of them will manage on a social worker’s salary. [emphasis added] It is Janice, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and Lisa, bashful Lisa, becoming the family extrovert, cheering the kids at ”toddler tumbling time” shepherding them to swimming lessons and story time at the library.

I have an idea (thanks, Leonard Pitts!). Instead of using her time to provide us with suspect stats that support her position, Terry might want to instead use it to help find homes for the “kids no one else wants.” I can help her with that. I know just where to look.

And no, she won’t find that home with me. In what is a personal failing to be sure, I don’t believe I have the strength to take on such an enormous life-changing task. And that’s why I would never randomly disparage someone who could. Or will.