Arkansas In Your Bedroom
Sometimes the deeper you dig the trench, the more ludicrous you look standing in it. Which brings me to the State of Arkansas’ Department of Health and Human Services and its argument to the Arkansas Supreme Court yesterday in defense of a policy prohibiting gays from being foster parents.
In its infinite wisdom, the Arkansas Child Welfare Agency Review Board, which oversees the state’s foster care program, came up with a humdinger of a trench. Tucked into its Standards for Approval of Family Foster Homes, this body of book-learned adults included the following:
Family foster parents must have the personal characteristics which enable them to assume the responsibility of caring for foster children. No person may serve as a foster parent if any adult member of that person’s household is a homosexual. “Homosexual”, for purposes of this rule, shall mean any person who voluntarily and knowingly engages in or submits to any sexual contact involving the genitals of one person and the mouth or anus of another person of the same gender, and who has engaged in such activity after the foster home is approved or at a point in time that is reasonably close in time to the
filing of the application to be a foster parent. p. 6, Section 6.0 A.2 PUB-022 (R. 01/2002)
Let me get this straight. If you engage or submit and have engaged at a time that is close in time, you’re out. And if any adult member of your household engages or submits and has engaged at a time that is close in time, he or she is out, too. But if you engage or submit but haven’t engaged at a time that is close in time, you’re safe. You’re also safe if you have minor members of your household who engage or submit and have engaged at a time that is close in time. But you may have other issues in which the State of Arkansas is interested.
The rationale behind this burst of brilliance is that, according to the agency’s lawyer, moral fitness is fundamental to the health and safety of foster children. And everyone knows that sexual orientation is the litmus test for moral fitness.
As Justice Annabelle Clinton Imber so astutely queried during yesterday’s oral arguments, Arkansas is also going to have to ask heterosexuals if they engage or submit.
I, for one, am not saying whether I engage or submit, or even if I have engaged or submitted at a time that is close in time. And you can bet your trench that the members of Arkansas’ Child Welfare Agency aren’t saying either.
Boy, that pisses me off. They’d deprive needy children of loving and stable homes because the parents are gay? But heterosexual couples can procreate at will, dump their infants in a garbage-cans to die, then years later be deemded reformed? But because you put your mouth on someone’s woo-hoo, you are unfit.
And I’m pretty most of the more publicized cases of foster parent abuse were by heterosexual guardians.
It never ends. A-holes.