'He has no mama now'

Jimmie and The'ssa McCoy were planning to adopt Adam, but social workers gave him to two homsexual men instead.

Laurie Ellinger still remembers the moment she first cradled Adam*, a chubby-cheeked black newborn with twinkling eyes and a budding crop of curly hair. Barely a month old, Adam was suffering a painful withdrawal from the drugs that had been pumped into his bloodstream before he was born.

So for the next several months, Ellinger, an emergency foster mom in Alameda County, Calif., rocked Adam to sleep in her arms as tremors quaked his tiny frame.

Through Ellinger's persistent care, though, the tremors subsided and Adam became a vigorous 1-year-old with a grin and giggle that easily charmed adults. So it was no surprise when two married Christian couples who regularly visited Adam fell in love with him and tried to adopt him. Jimmie and The'ssa McCoy, black parents who have cared for foster children since 1997; and Susan and Gary Hartman, a white couple state-licensed to provide baby-sitting services for Ellinger, had cared for Adam since his birth.

The couples had high hopes one of them would become new parents. Especially The'ssa McCoy, who had recently adopted another baby (Isaiah) cared for by Ellinger and said she had been told by social workers that her home also had been approved for Adam's possible placement. But in February 2000, the county shocked everyone by instead placing Adam with two white, homosexual men who eventually adopted him.

The decision was unprecedented, said Ellinger, because social workers are trained to choose a home that involves the least disruptive change for the baby. Instead, they moved Adam out of his own county into a "nontraditional" home of different ethnicity - and passed up not one, but two heterosexual, married couples who knew him personally.

"It made no sense," she said, adding that she still grieves for the now 4-year-old Adam. "The only word he was saying [at that time] was 'mama.' And he has no mama now."

Little-noticed cases like Adam's are popping up across the nation as homosexual activists intensify their quest to win government sanctioning of their lifestyle. And adoption represents one of the last hurdles standing in the way of that prize.

"The new millennium will see the battle for GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender] civil rights won," said a Web site for the Adoption Family Center, an agency for "nontraditional" families. "As we have come out in record numbers for same-sex marriage . . . gays and lesbians have also demanded our right to be parents."

Since only three states specifically forbid homosexual adoption - Florida, Mississippi and Utah - the resulting legal vacuum has enabled gay couples to gain adoption privileges on a county-by-county basis. And the foster care system provides a convenient back door for that approach, since most states give adoption preference to state-licensed foster parents. As a result, ground zero in the battle to normalize homosexuality has moved into the nation's courtrooms, where custody cases are deciding the fate of hundreds of children.

In Alameda County Juvenile Court, for instance, Adam's natural father vigorously protested his son's placement with a homosexual couple, begging the judge to place him with a black, married couple like the McCoys. But the judge ignored his pleas, giving social workers control over who adopted the baby.

"The interesting thing was," Ellinger later told Citizen, "I could not cut Adam's hair without permission from his parents. But he could be placed in a homosexual home, which both of his parents were violently opposed to." Asked why the state passed up two married couples before placing Adam with two gay men, Carol Collins, assistant director for the county social services department, told Citizen, "I'm really not in a position to respond to that."

Risking their own foster care licenses, the McCoys, Hartmans and Ellingers joined forces to protect Adam, writing letters to their representatives, telling their story to local media and attending the baby's placement trial.

"The McCoy family before you, and mine, are not in competition for Adam, but rather come together before you as two good choices," wrote Susan Hartman to a juvenile court commissioner. "Please do not refuse him the basic development, social and psychological need for a mother. . . . Please, your honor, Adam has already had a rough start."

But theirs was a lonely battle. In court, the Christian moms huddled together on one side of the room while the homosexual couple and lawyers from the San Francisco-based National Center for Lesbian Rights consorted on the other. "They had managers and a supervisor and three caseworkers and an attorney for them, and they also had a psychologist," remembered The'ssa McCoy. "We were like, 'Wow, they're bringing in the big guns.' "

Ironically, as homosexual activists complained in national media that they were being denied a "fundamental right" to have kids, the Christian families fighting for Adam in Alameda suddenly found themselves the target of behind-the-scenes intimidation.

One day after the trial, McCoy received a disturbing phone call from a social worker. "She told me that we have nothing to do with Adam, and we need to stop fighting and stop coming to the courts," McCoy told Citizen. "Then she said, 'How would you feel if I came and removed Isaiah from your care and you wouldn't be able to adopt him?' "

Since all that was needed to complete Isaiah's two-year adoption process was the signature of that same social worker, McCoy saw the comment as a veiled threat. Isaiah's adoption was eventually finalized, but pro-gay activists succeeded in prohibiting McCoy & Co. from attending the last part of Adam's trial.

Ellinger also suffered the consequences of protesting a homosexual adoption. She was temporarily suspended from sheltering foster children after social workers accused her of breaching confidentiality laws by making public Adam's intended placement with a gay couple (an event which garnered front-page news).

But Ellinger, who has cared for some 60 foster children over the last 22 years and was quickly reinstated after the controversy, believes the real issue was her refusal to bow to a political agenda:

"I told them [during the suspension meeting] that I felt a child should be placed with a mom and a dad. They asked how I can do my job if that was the way I felt. And I said, 'Because I take care of babies. That's what my job is.' And [the social worker] said, 'But how can you put . . . your feelings, your strong convictions, aside?'

"The whole thing was a power play," she said. "They wanted me to know their eye was on me."

But instead of backing down, the three families fought back harder. McCoy recruited the help of her church, Shiloh Christian Fellowship, which launched a letter-writing campaign to county officials, arguing that placing a black baby with two white, gay men was not in the child's best interest. Parishioners also held a prayer walk around the courthouse.

Though they ultimately lost the custody battle for Adam, the Alameda Christian community learned some valuable lessons, said McCoy: like the myth behind the claim that homosexual couples are getting children because nobody else wants them, the reality of prejudice against Christians within the foster care system and, most importantly, the need for the church to step forward.

"At that point we weren't just fighting for Adam," she said. "We were fighting for all children. ... The realization came to us that if this was happening to one child, how many times had it happened in the past and how many times will it happen in the future?"

Apparently, it's happening a lot. Courts in at least 20 states have granted same-sex adoptions. And gay activists have used emotional arguments to defeat homosexual-adoption bans elsewhere by claiming that since they take the foster children no one else wants - those suffering from AIDS, sexual abuse and severe mental disabilities - to prevent them from adopting is nothing short of cruelty to children.

Former TV talk-show host and foster parent Rosie O'Donnell put a popular face on that agenda last March when she "came out" as a lesbian opposed to Florida's homosexual-adoption ban.

"I think as long as the place is safe, [children] don't care what the parents do in the bedroom," she told Diane Sawyer on ABC's Primetime Thursday, adding that the gay men suing to overturn Florida's homosexual-adoption ban "should be held up and heralded as the perfect family, not as one that needs to be pulled apart because of hatred."

But is compassion for children really what's motivating the push for homosexual adoption? Less publicized comments from the gay community reveal a different agenda, one that caters to the whims of adults. A fact sheet posted by the Adoption Family Center, for example, said gay and lesbians "are troubled by the feeling that adoption agencies offer them the children who are the most difficult to place: those with physical, mental, or emotional disabilities; those who are older; children of color."

Equally revealing is the Florida lawsuit touted by O'Donnell, which bases homosexual adoption on a supposed constitutional "right" to be parents. However, the lawsuit leaves "unchallenged" the "assertion that the best interest of the child is to be raised by a married family," wrote U.S. District Court Judge James Lawrence King, who upheld Florida's law last August. (Homosexual activists have appealed the decision.)

But in the public limelight, at least, gays and lesbians have successfully painted themselves as a victimized group being denied the right to help impoverished children. Problem is, nobody seems to be worrying about the real-life babies becoming pawns in this latest political skirmish, those like Adam whose right to have a married mommy and daddy is forgotten.

Research completed over the last 30 years clearly shows that children need both a mother and a father to have the healthiest upbringing, according to Glenn T. Stanton, Focus on the Family's marriage and sexuality analyst. At the same time, there is no evidence that gay parenting actually benefits children.

"It is unwise to embark on a historically unprecedented and unproven social experiment with our children fueled by adult desire," said Stanton.

California isn't the only state where wisdom is lacking, as the plight of another baby, Stephen*, illustrates.

Like Adam, Stephen was born in 1997 with drugs in his system. But he had one thing going for him: his uncle, Eugene Helm, who won an award from President Clinton for putting aside his own career aspirations to raise five nieces and nephews (two are Stephen's sisters). Helm's heroic actions were featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and NBC's Today.

Despite those qualifications, when Helm learned social workers had taken Stephen from a younger sister because of her drug and legal problems, he found himself mysteriously cut out of the process. State officials didn't return his phone calls requesting information about the baby and, without notifying him, began the process of placing Stephen for adoption with a lesbian couple, according to Dallas attorney Kyle Basinger, who successfully fought for Helm's right to gain custody.

"All this was expedited without ever involving the one relative that wanted to take the child," Basinger told Citizen. "They wanted to place the child with a lesbian couple. I can't think of any other reason, because of the way it was all conducted in secret and shoved through."

Baby Stephen's case has disturbing similarities to the Alameda case in that those who tried to oppose the homosexual adoption were quietly punished.

Texas social worker Rebecca Bledsoe, for instance, sacrificed her career to defend Stephen's right to have a traditional family. Arguing that the "right" of homosexual adults to adopt shouldn't outweigh the need of children to have a mommy and a daddy, she removed then 3-month-old Stephen from the lesbian household.

"My professional view is that putting a child in any situation where there is admitted criminal activity of a sexual nature is wrong," said Bledsoe at the time, referring to Texas' sodomy law, which prohibits homosexual conduct. But even if the law didn't exist, she said, "In this situation, you are making a decision to guarantee that child will never have a father."

Despite her spotless work record during the previous 10 years, though, Bledsoe was demoted from her position as a supervisor for "failure to follow procedure" when removing Stephen. At least in Texas, she will never regain the tenure she spent 13 years obtaining.

Bledsoe, and other social workers interviewed by Citizen over the last five months, said the small percentage of homosexuals wanting to adopt isn't large enough to solve a real or perceived foster parent shortage - and for that reason, isn't enough to justify subjecting some children to taxpayer-funded experiments on homosexual parenting.

"There's probably not more than half a dozen licensed homosexual households in Texas," said Bledsoe. "It's not a significant enough number to risk some children.

"Which children will it be who are not going to have the opportunity of having a mother and a father?"

Still, homosexual-adoption proponents point out that some 580,000 children annually languish in the foster care system, asking "Why should they languish when gay parents are willing to adopt?"

But what they don't acknowledge is that in fiscal year 2000 only about 11 percent - or 64,000 - of those 580,000 had their parental rights terminated, making them eligible for adoption. And data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services show that, in 1999, married couples accounted for 66 percent of adoptions, while unmarried couples accounted for only 1 percent (397).

What's more, studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show there is a vast untapped pool of adoption seekers. More than a quarter of "ever-married" women have considered adoption (9.9 million). And according to the CDC, two of the strongest factors affecting which of those women take steps toward adopting are "being currently married" and "having ever used infertility services."

So rather than opening the system up to a small number of homosexuals, a more logical and far-reaching solution would be to reduce the red tape preventing married couples from obtaining children, according to Ken Connor, who served on the Governor's Partnership for Adoption in Florida and is now president of the D.C.-based Family Research Council.

"These children are languishing in foster care not because . . . people aren't willing necessarily to adopt them, but because the appropriate steps have not been taken to make those children adoption-eligible," he said.

An adoptive parent himself, Connor added that data show "homosexuals have higher incidences of drug abuse, domestic abuse, depression, suicide. . . . We know that foster care is not the ideal situation for a child, but rather than reverting to an alternative that is fraught with risk . . . let's cut through barriers and make it easier for people to adopt."

County governments' subtle antagonism toward religious and conservative families also aggravates the backlog of homeless children, according to social workers like Larry Phillips, who recently won a lawsuit against the Missouri government after being fired for refusing to place children with homosexuals because of his religious beliefs.

Formerly responsible for licensing and recruiting foster parents, Phillips said his county "had a shortage because they created a philosophy that limited who they would select."

Phillips recalled how a Baptist father who applied to become a foster parent made the mistake of admitting he was a strong Christian whose family regularly attended church. Privately, foster care supervisors expressed concerns about the man being a "right-wing fundamentalist," said Phillips, but they were too smart to discriminate in writing, so they "created secondary reasons":

"For example, with [the Baptist], they indicated he didn't have enough 'diversified social interests.' . . . A lot of what he did revolved around his church activities; they felt he was too narrow in his perspective.

"I spoke up, but I was outnumbered. We generally voted by consensus. . . . And I was just a lone voice. But there were many instances like this.

"The challenge is not . . . availability of homes," he summarized. "If we change the selection and screening process for traditional Christian families, we would have all the foster parents we need."

Some foster care divisions have gone so far as to create nondiscrimination policies that, in practice, place homosexual couples on equal or better footing than married couples - automatically putting religious families at a disadvantage.

"They'll take . . . a gay or lesbian couple who want children and they'll give them preference in the evaluative process in hopes of being diverse," Dale Billeter, a 15-year social services investigator for Alameda County (Baby Adam's hometown), told Citizen. "They'll put what I see as good religious families with good values on the bottom of the pile."

Christian families often are phased out through heavier screening processes and regulations, he said: "If you're going to be religious, then they are going to hold you to a greater weight of certain rules. Like where the bed's located. . . . Do they have their own separate bedrooms? . . . there's 100 different questions." Billeter also expressed concern that "we lost five of the best [religious] homes in the county" because of that bias.

Meanwhile, homosexual activists seem to have no trouble accessing the system. Paul Welander, a senior social worker for California's Santa Barbara County, told Citizen he and other co-workers were required to attend a gay-rights seminar in 2002.

During the seminar, speakers from a local gay activist group called the Pacific Pride Foundation announced they were actively recruiting more gay and lesbian foster parents and told social workers to place children struggling with their sexual identity in those homes.

That frustrated Welander, who said social workers have a hard enough time finding a home for any child:

"We are out here trying to do our job, and that is to place kids with the most loving families available. . . . So anybody coming in and saying, 'We demand this right' is an irritant to us.

"I don't think I'm being unduly nasty against this certain group," he added. "I'm more against the principle of the thing, of somebody trying to dictate to us . . . to mix and match just to their specific agenda."

But where individual foster parents and social workers have failed to change the system, Christians who pool their resources have conquered political pressure.

Take what happened to Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children (KBHC) - the state's largest private foster care provider, which has found homes for more than 1,200 children over the last five years.

Despite the home's vital role in alleviating that state's foster care backlog, in 1998 some 200 Louisville-area social workers signed a statement refusing to place children with KBHC. At issue was the home's refusal to hire avowed homosexuals to work with children, which the statement claimed violated the National Association of Social Workers' nondiscrimination policy.

For the next two months, KBHC saw its state referrals cut in half. Then the state social services department turned up the heat by requiring the home to sign a contract promising to abide by the association's code.

Not signing meant "we were going to have to go from a 22-million-dollar agency to about a 6-million-dollar agency," Bill Smithwick, KBHC's director, told Citizen. "The sad part was that all those kids we were helping were going to have to go somewhere else."

But thanks to the backing of hundreds of Christian foster parents, Smithwick and his board of directors stared down the state, choosing to lose government money (80 percent of the home's budget) rather than their biblical principles.

"There's a great satisfaction in doing what's right ... in knowing we are not promoting a lifestyle that is so damaging to young people," Smithwick said. In the end, the reality that the state had nowhere else to send hundreds of homeless children forced the hand of the governor, who overruled the contract change and sent a letter to social workers informing them they could refuse to place kids at KBHC if it violated their conscience.

Homosexual activists have since reignited their attack with a federal lawsuit challenging KBHC's government funding, not seeming to mind that they might eliminate hundreds of good homes from the Kentucky foster care system. But Smithwick remained confident that Christians working together could resist future attacks:

"This is an issue that America has got to wake up to. The homosexual agenda is a beast. [It] wants our kids. . . . And the only thing that's standing between them and that agenda . . . are those of us who believe in the Judeo-Christian values of this country."

WHO TO CONTACT: (1) Thank Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for defending his state's ban on homosexual adoptions and acknowledging that married households are healthiest for kids. Write the Office of the Governor, The Capitol, Tallahassee, FL 32399-0001 or call 850-488-4441 or e-mail fl_governor@eog.state.fl.us (2) The Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children has launched a campaign to become financially independent from the state. To find out how you can help, contact them at 1-800-456-1386 or visit Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children, Foster Care, Adoption

(3) For more information on homosexual adoption, check out these Family Research Council resources:

• I don't want my tax money to fund state-sponsored homosexual adoptions that make children guinea pigs in untested social experiments.

• Research completed over the last 30 years clearly shows that children need both a mother and a father to have the healthiest upbringing, while homosexual parenting is a new and unstudied phenomenon.

• State-funded homosexual adoption guarantees some children will never have a mother and a father. Is it fair to let the state choose which children those will be?

• If your state has a sodomy law, the social services department should not be placing children where there is ongoing criminal activity. (The following states have sodomy laws: Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia.)

• The "right" of homosexual adults to adopt shouldn't outweigh the need of children to have both a mommy and a daddy.

• Putting foster children already wounded by psychological or physical trauma in homosexual households gives them yet another emotional challenge to overcome.

• We shouldn't allow children to become political trophy prizes: Homosexual activists' own comments reveal that "adoption rights" are part of a political quest for acceptance (see main story).

But if thousands of foster kids are waiting for homes, aren't gay parents better than no parents?

• Actually, the homosexual population isn't big enough to alleviate the foster care problem (unmarried couples accounted for only 1 percent of adoptions in 1999).

• The truth is, red tape - not the lack of homosexual couples - is responsible for the backlog of homeless children: Of the 580,000 foster children in fiscal year 2000, only about 11 percent - or 64,000- had their parental rights terminated, which is necessary for adoption.

"He wanted to be a happy baby," Ellinger fondly recalled. "When he wasn't in pain, he was so sweet. He would smile and respond."

This tragic story show us why the wholesale acceptance of adoption as some kind of universal solution to social problems is just plain wrong. For one thing, adoptions are as unique as the individuals involved..... one solution does not fit all. Secondly, Adoption as an Institution is under fire from people with various agendas. I have posted extensively on the role of money in adoption. Some people use adoption as a cash cow. That's their agenda. Adoption of children can be used as a panacea for a failing marriage, as a way to advance one's political agenda, as a way to advance one's career. This story today is a great example of Adoption used as a political/cultural tool.

So when you hear the word adoption, please do not automatically assume the good intentions and the happy outcomes that various groups want you to see. Those who exploit children via the adoption vehicle want you to remain uninformed about the dark side of adoption. They want you to continue to have illusions about the process and the outcomes. They want to be able to continue to pull the wool over your eyes.

When you hear adoption stories in the media, take a moment to probe a bit. For instance, recent adoptors (beside Rosie) include Calista Flockheart and Tom and Nicole. They have the money but do they have the time and the heart to parent? Hitlerly and Liza Minelli have both stated recently they wanted to adopt. Why, do you suppose? People are using Adoption as a tool to advance their political agendas and their careers, as well as to satisfy personal needs. This is commodification of children on a terrible scale.

As to the "social experiment" aspect, when you speak with American women who experienced coerced adoption in the 1960s, they will tell you THAT was a failed social experiment. They will tell you that the technology used to separate them from their children was untested, and that the results have been a disaster for large numbers of them. We need to stop experimenting with our children, and with our mothers! Women and children are not lab rats.

As for the power wielded by social workers and the technology used by social workers to separate children from their families and trusted care givers,please carefully reread the article. These stories are so common that they no longer shock the long time observer. Social workers dealing with custody cases in this country have absolute immunity in many cases. That abuses follow under this condition is not surprising. Family not notified of a custody or fitness hearing until 30 minutes before? A common story. Family cut out of the loop? Commonly used technique. Threats, veiled or not, to a family's other children? Common technique.

Today the UN released an advanced edited version of the findings of a committe devoted to the rights of the child. Although the committee is primarily concerned with the exploitation of children by pornographers, it came to their attention that children were being offered for sale under the guise of adoption. Because the UN mandate covered children being offered "for sale" the committee accepted reports on adoption abuses where it could rightly be considered that women were being coerced into releasing children so they could be sold into adoption. Reports were accepted from developed countries and from third world countries. The entire section of the
report dealing with adoptionis fascinating; but of special interest is the last sentence of pp 110. See below.

ADVANCE EDITED VERSION
Distr. General 6 January 2003 Original: ENGLISH
COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS
Fifty-ninth session
Item 13 of the provisional agenda

RIGHTS OF THE CHILD

Reort submitted by M. Juan Miguel Petit, Special Rapporteur, on the sale of
children, child prostitution and child pornogrpahy in accordance with
Commission on Human Rights resolution 2002/92.

E/CN/2002/79
page 25

IV. OTHER ISSUES IN FOCUS
A. Adoption

110. During the course of 2002, the Special Rapporteur received many
complaints relating to allegedly fraudulent adoption practices. Where such
practices have the effect that the child becomes the object of a commercial
transaction, the Special Rapporteur, like his predecessor,
considers that such cases fall within the "sale" element of his mandate.
The Special Rapporteur was shocked to learn of the plethora of human rights
abuses which appear to permeate the adoption systems of many countries. The
Special Rapporteur considers that the best environment for most children to
grow up in is within a family, and that the adoption by a parent or parents
of a child who does not have a family able to look after him or her is a
commendable and noble action. Regrettably, in many cases, the emphasis has
changed from the desire to provide a needy child with a home, to that of
providing a needy parent with a child. As a result, a whole industry has
grown, generating millions of dollars of revenues each year, seeking babies
for adoption and charging prospective parents enormous fees to process
paperwork. The problems surrounding many intercountry adoptions in which
children are taken from poor families in undeveloped countries and given to
parents in developed countries, have become quite well known, but the
Special Rapporteur was alarmed to hear of certain practices within developed
countries, including the use of fraud and coercion to persuade single
mothers to give up their children.

111. Given the particular nature of many cases received, the Special
Rapporteur brought the information received to the attention of other
appropriate United Nations mechanisms and intends to continue to address
such abuses when they fall within the parameters of the mandate.

When are we going to become concerned ABOUT THE CHILDREN?

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