Group gets OK on drive for foster, adoption ban
Posted on Friday, October 5, 2007
The organization hoping to stop unmarried couples from adopting or becoming foster parents in Arkansas got the goahead Thursday to start a petition drive to earn a spot on next year’s general election ballot.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel certified the Family Council’s proposed initiated act, clearing the way for the conservative organization to begin collecting signatures. If enough have been gathered by summer, the proposal will qualify for the ballot in the Nov. 4, 2008, election.
Jerry Cox, president of the Little Rock-based group, said the petition drive probably won’t start in earnest until January but that he’ll begin immediately organizing the group’s statewide network of supporters.
It’s important to mobilize early, he said, because it will be more difficult to gather support for this effort than for the Family Council’s successful push in 2004 for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
Voters approved that by a 3-to-1 margin, but Cox doesn’t expect a repeat this time around. That’s because foster care and adoption aren’t in the news the way marriage was in 2004, when several states had ongoing battles about whether to legalize same-sex marriage or civil unions.
“In 2004, people were thinking about it, they were upset about it,” Cox said. “They were looking for something to do about it, and we provided them that.”
Cox said that doesn’t mean the adoption and foster care issue isn’t as important. But he couldn’t point to any pressing cases or problems with children’s care in Arkansas that would be remedied with the ballot initiative.
“There doesn’t always have to be a problem for a law to be passed,” Cox said. “Sometimes an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
The measure is the Family Council’s latest response to the 2006 Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that declared unconstitutional the state’s administrative ban on homosexuals serving as foster parents.
After failing to get the Legislature to prohibit gays or unmarried couples from adopting and fostering children, the organization came forward with the proposed initiated act.
It would go farther than the foster parenting ban, also applying to adoption, but the current proposal doesn’t mention homosexuals.
The proposal would ban unmarried sexual partners who live together — same-sex or opposite-sex — from adopting or becoming foster parents. Cox said it wouldn’t apply to single people, whether gay or straight.
He said he’s been told that gay couples in Arkansas are adopting children.
“The door is wide open for that to occur,” Cox said. “What we want to do is close that door.”
The state Department of Human Services has an agencyapproved policy that prevents unmarried couples from becoming foster parents, but there’s no current policy on adoption.
In approving the Family Council measure for the ballot, McDaniel was saying that the wording voters will see on their ballots accurately and fairly summarizes the act itself.
He rejected the first version of the proposal, in part because it included references to marriage as the ideal child-rearing environment and to “cohabiting” households as more prone to instability, poverty and other societal ills.
In revising its proposal, the Family Council struck those references and made other technical changes McDaniel suggested.
Cox said the Family Council, affiliated with the Coloradobased Focus on the Family, now will begin tapping its network of churches and church members to try to gather signatures. Cox said that was a successful strategy in 2004, when probably three-fourths of the more than 200, 000 signatures on petitions for the marriage amendment were collected in churches.
To qualify for the ballot this time, the organization has to gather at least 61, 974 signatures of registered voters by July 7. There’s a lower signature threshold for initiated act proposals than for constitutional amendments, which need 77, 468 signatures.
An initiated act can be changed by the Legislature with a two-thirds majority vote of the House and Senate.
While Cox said the Family Council will lean on its conservative Christian base to circulate the petition, there will be opposition to the proposal from Christians, as well.
The Rev. Scott Walters of Christ Episcopal Church in Little Rock said he’ll likely campaign against the measure. Walters pointed out that the Family Council’s web site lists homosexuality as an issue that the organization “speaks out” on, but it doesn’t include foster care or adoption in that list.
“My biggest concern is if we are talking about the health and well-being of foster kids, let’s talk about that. If there are controls to be put in place to make sure homes are safe,” Walter said. “But a blanket statement like this does not strike me as something that works in that direction.”
Walters said his opposition will be as a Christian minister and not on behalf of his church, which he said has a diverse membership that includes those who take a conservative stance on gay issues as well as gay couples.
A coalition is forming to oppose the measure, including child-welfare advocates, doctors ’ organizations, social workers and others. The group’s spokesman, Dr. Eddie Ochoa of Little Rock, didn’t return telephone messages by early Thursday evening.
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