IGF CultureWatch

Nearly three decades after Anita Bryant's notorious "Save the Children" campaign, increasing numbers of gay people are doing just that - giving loving homes to children that straight people have thrown away or have had taken from them due to neglect or abuse. No good deed goes unpunished, of course. Anita's heirs don't want us saving children. What is surprising is that efforts to make "gay adoption" a red meat issue in this year's election have mostly fizzled.

It is seven years since I sat in the visitor's gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives and watched as an amendment that would have banned adoptions by unmarried couples in the District of Columbia was narrowly defeated. The reference to unmarried couples thinly veiled the measure's anti-gay purpose, and its defeat was a big victory for the Human Rights Campaign. Since then, the issue has not been used again by Congress to attack gay Washingtonians at the expense of orphaned children.

This year there have been encouraging developments in many states. Anti-gay adoption bills in Arizona and Ohio stalled in their respective statehouses. A Virginia bill to prohibit doctors and other health professionals from helping unmarried women become pregnant failed to win support. In Utah, the governor vetoed an anti-gay parenting bill. The Indiana Supreme Court let stand a ruling allowing adoptions by unmarried couples. A federal judge struck down an Oklahoma law barring recognition of adoptions by same-sex couples from other jurisdictions.

It is hard to see what threat is posed by gay parents when so many children of heterosexual households go home each day to single, divorced or absent parents. Voters seem to understand this, since the issue has not caught fire as some had hoped. With many thousands of children in need of homes, the question is not whether a given child will have an idealized set of parents. "The question," as Congressman Barney Frank says, "is whether the child will be adopted at all."

Gay parents are quietly changing the social landscape simply by being a part of it. The right wing showed its awareness of this in early 2005, when PBS pulled the "Sugartime!" segment of Postcards from Buster off the air after U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings condemned it for showing the lesbian parents of the children Buster was visiting at a Vermont farm. WGBH, which produces the program, still made the segment available to PBS affiliates. When WETA in D.C. refused to run it, some colleagues and I wrote to the station's management protesting their caving in to the radical right's insistence that gay parents should be invisible.

WETA's polite but evasive reply included, "I hope you will continue to enjoy the many fine programs that we bring to the community and that you will not allow one decision to color your entire opinion of WETA." This implied that we were the ones being unfair, despite the fact that WETA happily took gay viewers' money while acquiescing in an anti-gay slander. But Buster and his friends had the last laugh. Not only did at least 45 PBS stations run the "Sugartime!" segment, the Family Pride Coalition and Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere have used it as an educational tool.

With the boom in gay parenting, my Dupont Circle neighborhood is awash in baby carriers and strollers. Children bring the world alive in new ways, and they can teach us a lot. For example, babies are not blank slates. This dawned on me 25 years ago when I sensed my newborn niece Jennifer's personality as we looked at each other through the glass of the hospital nursery. I generally thought of infants as noise and poop generators, and wasn't expecting anything more than a vague smile probably caused by gas. Yet there Jenny was, not a generic Muppet baby at all but a particular person already striking up a friendship. As with many of life's mysteries, I cannot explain it, I can only attest to it.

My friend Robert's great-nephew Joshua used to follow him everywhere, and wanted to be just like him. When Robert hosted a holiday party at his home for his office staff, Joshua greeted each guest just as he had watched his uncle do. Once, as Joshua played beside Robert with his Spiderman action figure, he started crying because Spiderman had "died" - meaning the doll wouldn't stand up. Robert saved the day by fixing Spidey good as new, and Joshua was overjoyed. When I think of all the children who have no Uncle Robert in their lives, I don't know whether to be angry or sad that some people are more eager to use them as props for telling cruel lies than to give them the nurturing they need.

In the early 1990s, a song by Fred Small called "Everything Possible" was popularized by the gay vocal quintet The Flirtations, and was subsequently sung by many gay choruses. It includes the line, "You can be anybody that you want to be." I appreciate its message of unconditional love and acceptance, but I think it goes a bit squishy. Children can be sturdy creatures if we give them some guidance and support. Better to tell them this: The only person you can ever be is yourself, but you are the one who gets to decide who that is. And I will always be here to help you become the best possible you.