Gay rights activists Leslie Cooper and Alphonso David (pictured) joined other gay rights activists from around the country in urging a New Haven audience to fight back against campaigns in 16 states to bar adoption by same-sex parents.
The note of hope at the conference, which was held at Yale Law School? That same-sex adoption opponents are wrong on the merits.
“Developmentally, in terms of emotional well-being — in all the research, our kids are coming out on par,” said Aimee Gelnaw, a social scientist and the former executive director of the Family Pride Coalition. At a conference on “The Fight For Queer Parenting Rights” at the Yale Law School on Thursday evening, her comment backed up the argument of ACLU senior staff attorney Leslie Cooper: that if these anti-gay cases were really about the kids, the same-sex couples would be winning them.
“It would be a slam dunk for us,” said Cooper, if it were clearly ruled that courts can’t discriminate on the basis of only speculations about the inferiority of the parents trying to adopt. Anti-gay-adoption cases couldn’t possibly win then, she said, “because none of the social science ever says that [gays and lesbians are inferior parents]. These kids are equally well-adjusted.”
Stopping courts from accepting these speculative arguments, said Cooper, would take getting a ruling that “heightened scrutiny” applies in these cases — a higher standard of protection against discrimination under the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Then, to prove they weren’t being discriminatory, courts ruling against gay adoptions would need real proof that the gay adopters would be bad parents. Which, says Cooper, they wouldn’t find.
The panel was sponsored by Outlaws, an organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the Law School community, and the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale. It was organized to address the challenges that queer parents and prospective parents already face, and the bigger challenges they’ll face if the laws advancing in 16 states banning gays and lesbians from adopting make it through.
Already granted in this room was that gays and lesbians make fine parents. The meat of the discussion, then — which Yale law professor Robert Burt introduced as a “part of the march to say that same-sex love has everything to do with family” — was about how conservative cases against queer adoptions are built, and how they can be undone.
On hand for this talk of legal strategy were some of today’s key players in the fight for LGBT rights. Leslie Cooper, part of the ACLU Lesbian and Gay Rights Project and currently at work on two key cases in Florida and Arkansas, talked somewhat optimistically about the legal possibilities opened by the 2003 case of Lawrence vs. Texas, which overturned Texas sodomy laws. She said the case “knocked the foundation” out of old justifications for banning gay adoptions on the grounds that homosexuality is criminal or immoral. With those “huge obstacles out of the way,” the road is clearer for real arguments about the best interests of the child, she said.
Alphonso David, a staff attorney at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, talked about the work he is doing to get both members of same-sex couples their legal recognition as parents. He said that the people who provide for kids, shape their routines, and interact with them on a daily basis, deserve to be called their parents — whether in order to adopt them, or in order to keep interacting with them in the event of a break-up. Referring to a case of the non-biological parent being granted custody over the child after a split, he said it was a positive sign for the movement. “I know it seems radical,” he said, “but it was in the best interests of the child.”
The problem, he said, is political. He said he thinks the “assault on gay and lesbian adoption rights” we’re now seeing has everything to do with “conservatives trying to get out their vote for next November.” He pointed to the gay-marriage ban’s success as a rallying point for social conservatives in 2004, and said he thought “they were after the same thing with [a gay-adoption ban] this time.”
If the pushers of the ban are thinking politically, then the opposition should think politically, too, was the apparent attitude of the last two panelists. Sharon Thompson, founder of North Carolina Gay and Lesbian Attorneys Institute for Equal Rights, shared some of her strategy, beyond her busy casework for her gay and lesbian clients. She talked about her efforts to get a gay-friendly clerk elected, who has since “been helping us every step of the way, to pay back his debt to the gay community” that got him elected, she said.
Thompson also reminded the New Haven audience of the disparity of LBGT rights progress across the Mason-Dixie line. “Maybe you here are excited about Vermont and Massachusetts, maybe you’re planning weddings,” she said. “In North Carolina, I’ve got a client suffering his two kids being taken away from him for sharing a house with another man.” She said that the court focused on the fact that the men were unmarried, to avoid the bumpy terrain of sexual orientation. “To rule against gay dad, they overturned 30 cases, going backwards to call all unmarried people [living together] immoral!”
Lastly, Aimee Gelnaw, representing the Family Pride Coalition, seconded the message that the fight for LBGT parenting rights isn’t just legal. Sharing a personal story of a time she couldn’t get to her adopted daughter’s emergency room bedside because there was no place in the hospital’s computer system to register a second mother, she said, “there’s a long way to go.” She advocated for LBGT-headed families getting together state by state to make their case, and said, “We need more good studies to bring to bear on the courts.”
Trained as an early childhood educator, Gelnaw was articulate and impassioned about what kids need. “What family means to children is the place where they belong,” she said. “Attachment theory has nothing to do with the sexual orientation of the person to whom they’re attaching.”
“The conservative right lies about our families all the time,” she added.
The hope of the event’s organizers was that not just law students but people from the larger New Haven community would come take advantage of the legal expertise on offer. “To have representatives from the ACLU and Lambda, the two biggest players in LGBT legislative advocacy, is incredible,” said Fadi Hanna (shown at right in photo with law student Mary Christensen), a co-chair of Yale’s OutLaws. “Someone can just stroll up and ask which state they should adopt in — it’s a pretty awesome opportunity.”
Deborah Marcuse, a fellow Yale student and a key organizer of the panel discussion, affirmed that getting legal information out to the general public was a main aim of the event. Recognizing that she herself knew “less than [she] needed to about the law” before becoming a student at Yale, she said it was wrong to restrict legal information to an elite community and “out of the hands of the people affected.”
Event organizers had advertised in Yale publications, on key bulletin boards on and off campus, and in local bars to try and pull in non-law students, said Outlaw Alfredo Silva. Snowstorm considered, it worked — with an estimated one fourth of the audience from outside communities.
One gay couple brought their high school-aged son all the way from New Hampshire to shake some accomplished legal hands and get inspired. He wants to be an LGBT civil rights lawyer. “These are the ties between the law school and the community that need to be exploited,” said Melissa Cox, another conference facilitator.
Aimee Gelnaw said the “social sciences people made a beeline for her” at the reception afterwards, with follow-up questions about the research results currently out there. “Do people need a father and a mother? We don’t know,” she said, explaining that certainty would depend on longer studies that followed more kids from same-sex households into adulthood. “The research is not enough. We need better funding, bigger samples; we need to make sure the questions are being asked that will provide the data that includes our families,” she said.
Alphonso David from the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund said he’d fielded a question from a Connecticut man wondering if a civil union would work against him and his partner when they went to adopt. David reported having told him that if they were interested in an international adoption, it could, “since many countries’ adoption laws preclude same-sex couples from qualifying as parents.” And if they planned to adopt within the country? Then a civil union could still mean a risk right now, David said, citing again the 16 states considering bans on same-sex parenthood.