GAY COUPLES BANNED FROM EVEN BEING FOSTER PARENTS IN ARKANSAS!

AN ARTICLE FROM THIS SUNDAY'S NY TIMES


November 9, 2008
Antipathy Toward Obama Seen as Helping Arkansas Limit Adoption

By ROBBIE BROWN
Strong opposition to the candidacy of Barack Obama in Arkansas may have helped conservatives pass a measure blocking the adoption of children by unmarried couples.

The measure, which voters overwhelmingly approved Tuesday and which prevents unmarried cohabitating couples from adopting or fostering children, won strong support from conservatives, exit polls found. The ban affects all unmarried couples but was written with the intent of preventing gay couples from raising children in Arkansas.

Unlike most states, Arkansas shifted to the right politically in this election. Senator John McCain won the state by 20 points compared with President Bush’s nine-point victory in 2004.

“I think white Arkansas Democrats felt cross-pressured in this race,” said Jay Barth, a political science professor at Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark. “They didn’t want to vote for what they viewed as Bush’s third term, but they also couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Barack Obama.

“One response was just to bow out of voting, and their absence probably helped this proposal succeed.”

Many experts did not expect the measure to pass with Democrats nationwide flooding the polls to support Mr. Obama for president. Prominent politicians, including former President Bill Clinton and Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, publicly opposed the ban. Critics ran television advertisements of foster children pleading with voters not to make it harder for them to find families.

But conservatives mounted a grass-roots campaign, mainly through church groups, that framed the state’s case-by-case approach to adoption requests as an affront to traditional family values.

“We believe that the best place for a child to grow up is in a stable home with a married mother and father,” said Jerry Cox, president of Family Council Action Committee, which obtained 95,000 signatures to place the proposal on state ballots. “But we also believe in blunting a gay agenda that we see at work in other states with regard to marriage and adoption issues.”

Exit polls found that the ban was primarily supported by conservatives, supporters of Mr. Bush and evangelicals.

After the votes were tallied, adoption groups decried the new policy as contrary to the well-being of children. Arkansas has three times as many children who need homes as people willing to adopt or foster them, said Brett Kincaid, campaign director for Arkansas Families First, a coalition of groups opposing the ban. He said the ban would make adoptions less common.

Arkansas is not the first state with such a policy. Florida prohibits adoption by applicants who identify themselves as gay, Utah prevents unmarried cohabitated couples from adopting and Mississippi specifically bans same-sex couples from adopting.

A survey in October by the University of Arkansas found 55 percent of voters in the state opposed to the ban. But conservatives ratcheted up their lobbying before the election, distributing 350,000 inserts for church bulletins, and the measure passed with nearly 57 percent of the vote.

“I was very surprised that our margin of victory was as wide as it was,” Mr. Cox said. “Our campaign was primarily grass-roots. The opposition was primarily a media campaign. They did everything they should have done to win. But we won.”