arkuat

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This is the worst. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/opinion/12savage.html

Arkansas passed a law prohibiting those “cohabitating outside a valid marriage” from adopting children, or, get this, even serving as foster parents.

The existing foster parent pool in most states needs to be weeded, no doubt, but a weeding so hamhanded as this uproots as much of the good crop as it does the weeds. Probably more, if you think of the uphill struggle that "unmarried cohabitants" probably have had to go through in Arkansas to become foster parents even before this vicious new law was passed. California's Prop 8, which I pray will be overturned, doesn't directly hurt the most oppressed class of people -- children who are wards of the state -- so directly as this initiative of the Arkansas electorate does.

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From:

pameladean

This is a frivolous response to a really bad problem, but my first thought was, "Wow, Anne of Green Gables would have been SoL in Arkansas." (Adopted by a brother and a sister who were running a farm together, neither of whom ever married.) Quite apart from its fundamental bigotry, I don't see how this law can have been given a nanosecond's thought by anybody with a functioning brain.

P.

From:

arkuat

Anne's adoptive parents probably would get an out under current Arkansas law based on the fact that they, as siblings, were cohabiting within the protection of their deceased parents' marriage. Which doesn't make the new Arkansas law any better.

Thanks for all your replies about the policy of truth; I hope I will be able to reply to each and every one of them, but right now I really must try to get to sleep. And break a leg with Arry and Ruth.

From:

pameladean

Oh, Lord, that's so awful it's funny. A dead heterosexual marriage is more important than live same-sex ones.

I hope you did get to sleep. No worries on the email, m'dear.

P.