ALL HAPPY FAMILIES: Julian Sanchez on Fla. adoption law

"Will you be my daddy?"

Wayne LaRue Smith regarded his young foster son, who had only a short time earlier come to live with Smith and his partner Dan Skahen, from across the dinner table. His first instinct and fervent desire, he says, was to respond: "Of course! I'd love to be your dad." But the hard realities of Florida law required him to maintain a pained silence: A checkbox on the state's adoption form requires prospective parents to declare whether they are homosexual and therefore, under a unique provision of the state's family law statutes, ineligible to adopt.

Smith was "rescued," he says, by his other, younger foster son--one of 23 the pair have cared for at various times. "No, I want you to be my daddy. Or," turning to Skahen, "you can be my daddy." And then, evincing enormous satisfaction at his sudden epiphany: "I know, I'll have two dads."

And, in effect, he will: The state has since awarded permanent guardianship of the younger child, now in first grade, to Smith, a Key West attorney, and Skahen, a real estate broker. While that doesn't give the child all the benefits full adoption would--a guarantee of Social Security survivor benefits should some accident befall his guardians, for example--it provides the kind of stability vital to children in foster care, who have often been removed from homes where they faced abuse or neglect. The couple's older foster child, now eight, is less fortunate: Though he has now spent almost four years with Smith and Skahen, the state continues to seek to place him in a heterosexual home. ...

Their model for emulation, Florida, is currently "protecting" quite a few children from gay adoption: Its foster care system holds more children than any state's save California's and New York's. And keeping track of them all is hard work. As 2004 drew to a close, Florida could not account for the whereabouts over 500 children nominally in its custody. Sometimes the protection is of the sort afforded Yusimil Herrera, who after being moved from one foster home to another 20 times, homes in which she was beaten and sexually abused, won a $4.5 million jury verdict against the state. (The verdict was later overturned; Herrera and her sister accepted a much smaller settlement.) Herrera now stands accused of murdering her own young daughter.

Florida's children will continue to be protected from the likes of healthcare professionals Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau, who care for five children born with HIV, three of whom have been with the couple since infancy. The Miami-based Children's Home Society named an annual award for outstanding foster parents after Lofton and Croteau, its first recipients. No matter, according to Florida Christian Coalition director Bill Stephens, who maintains that "courts are doing what's in the best interest of children and keeping them in heterosexual homes." That's not quite right, of course, but they are, at any rate, keeping them in homosexual homes only under constant threat of transfer.

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posted by Eve at 4:29 AM | link

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