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20% of same-sex couples with children have an adopted a child compared with 3% of straight couples (this will become important at the end of the article).
Bethany Christian Services announced last year that it will begin providing family friendly services to same-sex couples nationwide. Thank you Bethany Christian Services.
For decades, Evangelical Christians and the Catholic Church have led the charge disenfranchising Gay couples from adopting or fostering America’s most vulnerable children.
At times, the Catholic Church ended all foster/adoption services in communities allowing same-sex couples parental rights (most recently, after the Supreme Court threw out the Church’s case to end Gay adoption).
Most of us in the field of Child Protection would agree that this is less of what Jesus would do and more like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unfortunately, many Christian American’s are getting more satisfaction enforcing debatable religious dogma than saving abused and neglected children that have no family or home. My guess is few if any people on the wrong side of this debate have ever come to know a State Ward child to find out what growing up in a toxic home is like or what it’s like being placed in a stretched thin foster care system or County Group Home and not having a family.
To children taken from the only home they have ever known and placed in the cold hands of the County, it seems inconceivable that denying this child a possibility of a forever home with parents that know what suffering and punishment is and what the sensation of being all alone in the world feels like, is just cruel.
To put a finer point on this misunderstanding or hypocracy, Gay couples have been more willing to adopt hard to adopt children than straight couples. As a CASA guardian ad Litem volunteer, I never asked why but I think it’s because the LGBTQ community identifies with the issues of self- hate and isolation that that a foster child is bringing into their home.
LGBTQ parents have lived with the same kinds of feelings and fears abandoned children live with. Self-doubt, self-hate and being ostracized in the classroom and the community are familiar to same-sex couples.
Think about it. Growing up gay is a trauma to start with. Especially for those old enough to be married and able to adopt who came into this community when it was absolutely uncomfortable to come out and declare a gay lifestyle.
The similarities with growing up gay and growing up abused and neglected are many.
In my experience in child protection as a volunteer CASA guardian ad Litem, gay couples are exceedingly well suited for raising State Ward children. They have both the empathy and understanding of what it’s like to suffer multiple adverse childhood experiences and be different and all alone in a cold world.
Add to that this articles opening statistic that 20% of same-sex couples with children have an adopted a child compared with 3% of straight couples makes a pretty strong argument that there is a great deal more concern for other people’s children in the LGBTQ community that there has been in the religious community.
Shame on the Church for refusing to place children with gay families. It is already way too hard to find forever families for our abused children – please stop making it harder.
And of course, what would Jesus do?
KARA reports on the issues of child abuse.
This article submitted by CASA volunteer Mike Tikkanen
All Adults Are The Protectors of All Children
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