Not the Cleaver Family

Do you remember that controversial children's book, Daddy's Roommate? It was the fictional story of two homosexual men who raise a little boy, and it caused a storm of protest. Well, thanks to a superior court in Washington State, that story has come to life. It's a sordid tale of how a child was sacrificed in the cause of legitimizing perversion. The story began in 1993 when a young mother named Megan Lucas surrendered her parental rights after being investigated for child neglect. Her child, a three-year-old boy name Gailen, was placed in foster care in the Seattle home of Ross and Luis Lopton, two avowed homosexuals. When Lucas discovered where Gailen was living, she tried to regain her parental rights. But a superior court judge refused to give Gailen back. Why? Because Lucas had filed her application one day too late to meet a deadline set by state law. Meanwhile, the Loptons decided to adopt Gailen. A desperate Lucas tried to adopt Gailen herself. But the court said no to that, too: It pointed to Lucas's criminal record and history of drug and alcohol abuse. And last December, a superior court granted permanent custody of Gailen to the Loptons. With the stroke of a pen, the court declared that a mother with a record of behavioral problems in the past was unfit to raise her own child. And it gave full parental rights to a pair of men whose current behavior is illegal in many states. As you might expect, homosexual activists were jubilant. They claimed that little Gailen now had a chance to be raised in a "real" home as part of a "real" family. But since when have two homosexuals and someone else's child constituted a family? The answer is, since never. What's really going on in this tragic case is another confrontation between the traditional morals of the Christian tradition and the radical egalitarianism of the ideological Left. The Christian tradition is, of course, based on the Bible. But it's also based on centuries of time-tested experience of what is right in all human relations. And one of the most tried-and-true relations of all is that a family consists of a husband and wife and their children. Of course, families can fall apart due to divorce or death. But the definition of the family is not affected by any circumstance. By contrast, the radical Left insists that the only definition of existence that counts is the autonomous individual, responsible to no one—someone who's "free" on the basis of the Left's foundational conviction. That conviction is "Do Your Own Thing." The result is judges who abandon centuries of biblical truth in favor of the fleeting fashions of the day. You and I ought to look into our own state's adoption laws and urge our lawmakers to protect kids from being raised in households that model perversity. We need to make sure that the only kids forced to grow up with "Daddy" and his roommate exist only in the pages of books.

07/21/95