Originally appeared February 13, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.
FOR SOME AMERICANS, gays and lesbians are still the dark shadow that hovers at the edge of polite society, waiting to swallow their children.
Maybe they've never articulated their fear, even to themselves; or maybe they still think that we will molest their children or entice them (gasp!) to be like us. They are afraid that being raised by lesbians or gay men will make children unacceptably different - that it will masculinize girls, femininize boys, or simply make them unlike other children and so worse off. They believe that it is one of their sacred duties as parents or potential parents to keep the most vulnerable members of society from swaying under our influence.
But what they forget is that many of us are parents or potential parents already. Between one and 10 million children have at least one gay or lesbian parent. They have come from our bodies or from the bodies of our partners - or we have planned for them, searched for them, waited and hoped and prayed. We have walked the floors with sick children at night, we have helped them with math homework, we have driven them to soccer games. And it is this fact that the American Academy of Pediatrics was honoring this month when it announced that it supported the rights of gays and lesbians to adopt their partner's children.
"Children who are born to or adopted by one member of a same-sex couple deserve the security of two legally recognized parents," the academy said in Pediatrics, its scientific journal.
This is important, because only six states (Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Vermont) and Washington, D.C., currently allow second-parent adoptions outright. Three ban them. And in the rest of the 41 states, the laws are murky, making parents unsure of what their rights actually are until they test them out.
Adoption protects the rights of children, as well as parents. If one parent dies or is incapacitated, adoption permits children to stay in the security of their home with their other parent. It offers them Social Security survivor benefits. It gives children access to health benefits and provides them with a second parent who can consent to medical care. It creates legal ties between a child and each of her parents in the event the adults separate. Basically, it establishes the right for gay and lesbian couples and their children to be families under the law.
Of course this frightens some people. Why wouldn't it? It threatens their very notion of the building blocks of society. Because if the law declares that a lesbian couple and their children are a family, entitled to the legal rights that a family has, then it begins to seem absurd that the couple isn't entitled to the legal benefits of marriage.
Either mother can be her child's next of kin if the child lands in the hospital-�but in most states, neither parent can be the automatic next of kin for each other. The surviving partner doesn't receive Social Security benefits. If the employer of one spouse isn't generous or isn't required to provide benefits by their local state or municipality, the other partner might not have access to health benefits while helping raise their child. The family circle is left with a ragged, gaping tear.
For us, first comes children - but never comes marriage, or at least legal unions in 49 states.
Even so, the American Academy for Pediatrics ruling brings us a step closer to having our families recognized. The widely-respected 55,000 member institution recognizes that we raise healthy, well-adjusted kids-or at least as healthy and well-adjusted as the kids heterosexuals raise. We are just as loving, just as supportive. And our children are just about as likely to be gay, though one study has said they are more likely to be tolerant of gays and lesbians.
But most of all, it recognizes that we have already created and are already creating families. We already have children in our homes, our hearts and our lives. Now we simply need laws in the other 43 states to catch up with the reality.
What the Academy recognizes is that we are like every other family in America except for one thing - our children are not guaranteed the protection of their second parent in places where they cannot be adopted.
The new policy statement doesn't change anything, of course. The laws are still as they were. But hopefully these pediatricians will influence the changing of the laws, both through their collective and individual weight. Hopefully courts will point to this policy statement and decide in favor of America's children, agreeing that since America's pediatricians have declared that it is healthiest for children to be adopted by their second parent, the court will not stand in the way of that adoption.
Until then, we still have work to do. Parents or not, we need to stand together and support through letters to our newspapers and public officials the right of gays and lesbians to adopt their own children. Because the fact is that our families are no different than America's other families - only the laws remain to be changed.