Get Used to It: Ep. 26, "Adoption"

oh [Music] hi i'm sheila james kewell welcome to get used to it today we're going to talk about adoptions and by extension the legalization of gay families such as it is or the failure to legalize gay families and what that's all about i'm very pleased to have three wonderful guests with me today the first roberta bennett bobby bennett who is a certified family law specialist an attorney in private practice in westwood and who has been a pioneer in same-sex family adoptions welcome bobby thank you stephanie farrington doming who's the director of community outreach and education department at the la gay and lesbian community services center welcome stephanie thank you thank you and dr greg travis who's a psychologist working with gay men who want to be dads and is a i guess we'll call him a surrogacy consultant all three of my guests today are people who work with us in our community uh in helping to fulfill our desires to have families whether by adoption or by surrogacy or by being biological parents and hoping that our partners can adopt and we want to explore sort of the full range today now why are we talking about this well as i'm sure many of you know very recently there was a bit of a flap with the department of social services who had decided that their long-standing policy not to recommend uh adoptions by same-sex couples was in error and was they were going to change this policy perhaps because the aclu was threatening to sue them since the policy had never been formally adopted and when governor wilson discovered that this policy was about to be rescinded he issued a directive saying ah we're going to keep this policy in place i don't want gay couples adopting children and that's in essence i think where we are at the moment now i've said uh something about this bobby but you're really the expert can you tell us what the policy was how it uh dss was going to try to change it and what old pete really did well i think the important thing to realize sheila is that these adoptions are still taking place all that changed was the procedure by which these adoptions actually happened and initially the policy was a little bit different depending on the situation but the most common situation was the one where one of the parents is already a legal parent and wants to add a lover on same-sex lover as the second parent and we would actually have to under the old policy which is now the new policy again we would have to actually petition the court to make the bureau of adoption do the home study because they wouldn't even do that which they would do as a matter of course in any other adoption procedure when they were ordered to do the home study they went out they did the study and they took what is called a limited consent meaning that i want this person to adopt my baby my child but i don't want to give up any rights i now have as a parent the bureau took the limited consent wrote up its report and because there was no methodology for taking a limited consent they would say we find that the adoption is in the best interest of the child but we have to reluctantly deny the adoption and that was their standard policy and that is the policy that the governor has reinstituted that that is correct and and in that kind of a policy the judge your judicial officer has the discretion to overrule the bureau of adoption and of course as soon as the judge heard best interests of the child technicality limited consent i'm approving the adoption and that's what happened the new policy did a number of things and got rid of some of these fallacies that were going on to accomplish the goals one being that we would take a look at the best interests of the child and not the marital status of the parties that was the first one so would that have affected heterosexual couples too absolutely heterosexual couples who were not married would then have been allowed to adopt which they are not now allowed to adopt unlimited consents it actually spelled out as a policy and remember this is not law this is policy the policy that yes limited consents can be accepted if it's in the best interest of the child to have this child adopted we will take the limited consent we will recommend full approval that was the policy that wilson found out about claim did not go through the proper channels to be instituted as a policy had it rescinded which left us with going right back to the old policy which is where we are now now i have a theory as you know i teach gender and law at a couple of law schools and i have a theory that the reason that the the department was having so much trouble figuring out what to do with these things is for heterosexual couples you say to them look you can get married if you get married we can do a step parent adoption really easy we do those we let the person that you marry who's not the biological parent of your child adopt his child right right but with you guys you can't get married so we're not exactly sure what to do with you and it is the case historically that a child can only have legally one mother and one father that's the way we've looked at it that's why step parent adoptions are easy shot for us because we're just adding one of the other sex but your this so-called limited consent is you've got a mother who's not giving up her rights and another mother who wants to have full parental rights and there was no real way for the law to get this and get behind it i mean i don't know whether people really understand that you don't have any parents unless the law says you do i mean we have families all the time right that's right you have a family you and diane had two children each and raise these children together are you a legal family no why not because somebody out there in government has determined that they don't want to give any legal recognition to my family and when you say am i a family yeah we're a family is our family recognized no it isn't so what diana and i have is basically all of the responsibilities of being a family and none of the legal benefits all of the emotional benefits none of the legal benefits and by that i mean it costs us twice as much to raise our family in many areas to health insurance policies cannot file taxes together i mean there there are a lot of benefits that would be coming our way if in fact we had some legal recognition as a family but you did just participate in an adoption didn't you yes we did what was that well that was under the new policy uh that has since been rescinded by governor wilson and it's a little bit different because this was not one of the this is not the policy this is not the adoption that i described to you uh neither diane nor i had uh was a parent to this child he was our grandson and uh they the bureau of jobs didn't didn't know what to do with us at all because here we were adopting this was the first time two women adopted together on the same petition and we were not married uh and i held it i held this adoption up i held this adoption up the new policy came into effect and i jumped all over everybody and i said now and sure enough it was a very small window period before wilson just did rescind it it's interesting to me because as i as i said before i mean we have all kinds of families we we are filled with love in our community and we have children and we love each other's children and we raise each other's children and well stephanie you have personal experience in this and also can you tell us a little bit about the i'm interested in our desires to be families to form families um the work that you do at the center and your own experience well it's it's well as far as my own experience uh i've been in a relationship with my partner almost nine years and she has a daughter that's 19 years old so i've been co-parenting for the last nine years and that's been an interesting experience sandy and i have talked about adoptions but we we haven't quite gotten it together i wanted an older little boy that was maybe lost in the system that i could reach out and say come on let's go and offer them a different life different options than they would probably have sandy says no you want a baby and i'm thinking 2 a.m feedings i don't really think so you know and i know what who'd have to do that and and am i so selfish that i don't want to sacrifice my career and and all of that to to go with the 2 a.m feeding zone so that's where we are personally but i think it's quite interesting what i'm experiencing as i work with the community through my department at the center is there's a whole new energy around the issue of family how we perceive ourselves as family we have several groups that meet at the center we've got lesbian moms and our children we've got gay fathers we've got maybe baby for gay and lesbian individuals that are considering parenting and we've got just for us which are the children of gay and lesbian parents so there's there's a whole new energy going on around the issue of family and then we begin to look at how do we perceive ourselves as family how do we create our families within the context of our community so that's that's a thrust as a matter of fact through my education advisory council we formed a family task force and they're beginning to do investigations on in in relationship to the center how do we want to create a family space within the center so as we look at at our structure and what we're doing we start thinking about child proofing a room and um you know different types of meeting and connections for parents and their children and so that's really interesting because several years ago within our our community i mean it was about party it was about be out there the perception is we were single free swinging out to have a good time and now i find us full circle really desirous of creating those families and investigating the different options through insemination adoption uh surrogate parenting and and you know all aspects where do you think this new energy is coming from i mean you called it a new energy although my experience and i've only been probably i haven't had an awareness really of a community that i could come into for you know maybe the last 15 years or so but it is a growing sense of wanting to not just establish families because we've always had families really many of us have always had families but it's more like it's more of a public recognition of our families absolutely is that what you're saying yes it's it's incorporating our families into the plan the plan is not just a single life style anymore it it's incorporating that family because many of us through previous marriages find ourselves parents anyway and then we couple and we're co-parenting and so it has become a natural course of our lives and and now we are acknowledging it and embracing it and factoring it in the plan well before i get to sort of the political equation of it because that's a part that i think is is a a big part of what i think is going on in the country both with us and with them i guess as it were greg tell me a little bit about your work with gay dads and wannabe dads well my most my work right now is through a surrogacy agency who has a long track record of doing very very successful matches for heterosexual parents heterosexual couples and their official policy has been not to have gay dads or single men come to them for for a match but through the diligence of a few people who have been very very motivated and keep finding little pathways into the agency getting an advocate within the agency they've actually had some very very successful in terms of the the dads in terms of the surrogate moms in terms of the outcomes of the kids matches and they wanted me to come on board to start researching this as they're sort of doing this sort of against their quote unquote policy they wanted to have some information what is this thing we're doing most people there are very liberal minded but they're conservative in terms of the status of surrogacy within the california right now just to sort of explain what what surrogacy means for people who might not have either thought about it or etc there's a obviously when two men are together they don't have the ability to bear a child they are they need to find somebody else um a woman right to bear a child for them and this has been the case with infertile infertile heterosexual couples who have contracted i mean we've all read sort of about the the you know the wild surrogacy cases who've contracted with a woman to to bear the child and created a whole legal question about whether the contract is enforceable and she can keep the child etc but now we have uh gay men new applications we want to father and need somebody to at least bear the child and maybe have some of their own genetic material right one of the child's genes that i do in my research and with gay and with gay men who come to me who are curious about being a parent sort of pre-adoptive questionnaire some of the questions i ask is why surrogacy versus adoption just sort of to help people start understanding that that issue it's an important one for for wannabe parent to grapple with and i mean it's a bigger issue than i can get into right now but for those who decide to go the surrogacy route that for whatever reasons they want that genetic tie to their child um i even i do ask the dads like why did you choose surrogacy over this so from the dad's mouth it's pretty much i want to be a dad with my own genetics they want that extra tie in order to sort of kick in all the fatherly instincts if you will um being related seems to be important to to to a group of men not to all not to all gay men and it's not just a new option that that say it's not readily available out there but as a few people have persevered and i would say technology law and culture sort of coming together in a way that's allowing this option for some people and so the surrogate mom essentially agrees and and mostly probably goes through with um giving the child up for adoption is that sort of what would happen i'll refer more to you for all the legal ins and outs but what i understand is there's most moms are selected because they have the willingness and ability to go through with this type of arrangement it's all open if you have a gay dad or gay couple the surrogate mom knows it it's not a it's not a secret from her at least the ages that i work with that's the way and most reputable agencies are done that way so it's open it's understood and usually what the idea is that she will surrender her parental rights either for the single dad to be the sole parent or as we were talking before now there's this new option of biological dad and his partner be both becoming parents to to the child is that how it works bobby yeah you're in a unique position sheila because truly sacramento has got to take a look at uh some surrogacy laws that make sense because right now the the attorneys are just out there and we're punting all over the place and we don't know what's legal or illegal and there really isn't enough case law to give us any guidance in this area but but basically that is correct and recently this genetic wanting to have a genetic attachment to a child is for some people extremely important and i just recently did a surrogacy for two gay men who both had a genetic attachment you know who i'm talking about they're part of my religion to the child and the adoption judge didn't know what to do with this one at all so we got consents from the egg donor and we got consents from the woman who actually carried the child who was a separate individual from the egg donor and it gets real confusing and i did that i did that but i mean i didn't have anything to look at no forms no law no guidance and neither did my judge well the problem seems to arise just from the legal sense if the birth mother doesn't want to give up her rights and she's also the genetic mother now we had a case where there was an egg donor a different birth mother and the court said well the egg donor is the real mother so the courts are punting too but beyond the legal question of it here's the interesting thing to me because you identified it stephanie i think as well we used to be a community that was not necessarily interested in having children together in terms of completing our families we were having children within marriages both men and women in their heterosexual marriages then they would leave the marriage often the court would find against them and say you know the straight parent gets the kids although in in your case that was not the case uh you and diane both kept your kids but still that was why you had them to have to decide to have another one which is a lot more trouble um within the context of a gay or lesbian partnership it took us a while to get to it and yet we did come to it and there was a a great yearning in our community it's even been called the gaby boom i think at the moment um to not where it's almost like we woke up and said to ourselves why are we denying ourselves children it's like self-punishment like we're not good enough to have them or something why not this is a really family thing so now we finally as a community come to this but guess what the rest of the world is now saying okay now that you want to form your families this way this is a very important barrier for us to put in front of you and we're going to put a lot of barriers in front of you forming your families this way let me ask you why do you think they're so adamant about putting these barriers in front of our having families family should be a good thing i think in a lot of ways um we find like parties trying to set themselves up to be the family value parties and i think that denying us these options such as adopting marrying sticks the wedge in there and it keeps us less than if we were allowed to marry if we were allowed to adopt we would be in essence equal and there would be no heterosexual heterosexual privilege and this is this is this is what they're fighting to drive that wedge in there because they do not want to give us our civil rights they do not want to give us our equality we are not supposed to be privy privy privy thank you to the full rights and responsibilities and you spoke about that earlier that we had all the responsibilities and none of the rights and i think as a community we were really waking up and and moving towards our rights and and when you even talk about surrogate parenting and having that genetic connection there's a perception of a different right to that child a different right to your family unit when you approach it that way this is not the first group in history that's been denied legal recognition of their families as an aspect um i mean it was stunning to me when i realized in the course of teaching a class that that that was the case of course because i'm not african-american it didn't com it didn't occur to me right off like it should have but slaves of course were denied were denied the ability to marry right their families were just broken as though why they weren't human why weren't they human because they couldn't marry i mean it sort of makes right this enormous circle am i making a species comparison or no i i think so and and if we look further there was a time when japanese americans and and chinese americans were not allowed to marry really so withholding they're less than you don't have the right to and that works on your psyche and and and look at what you do to an individual that you don't allow to have their full expression of who they are you know to even think about themselves as being an equal or to embrace the rights that we supposedly have in this country so once again driving the stake and there's this great feeling in america or as our system perpetuates that someone's got to be up here and somebody's got to be down here so this is another way of making us that throwaway population of individuals the less than and making the distinctions and keeping us down here and it's sort of one of those things where when you're a kid let's say you're newly beginning to figure out that you're gay all of the horrible things about being gay come into your sort of lack of self-esteem i mean and one of them must be well gosh now i guess i can never have a family is that what you find with well that's what i was reflecting before about when i started counselor training 15 years ago at the time very compassionate gay supervisors were telling me when you're dealing with clients coming into the office into my office well of course you're going to be seeing a lot of grief from a lot of men or women that they're going to be giving up their role or potential role as being a parent and that was considered very progressive 15 years ago just to be recognizing that that grief was appropriate of course they were courses and that was you cannot talk about the developmental stages of say the the huge gay and lesbian movement from the 60s 50s 60s 70s 80s and etc and maybe that was developmentally understandable but now i have young men coming into my practice early 20s and of course they know the option of being a dad is there it's just such a a difference in 15 years and here i am actively involved with gay men wanting to be daz exploring those options before it was as you mentioned a lot of men who were perhaps closeted or in marriages didn't understand their sexual orientation became dads and then came out and those those men have a lot of issues and concerns too but there's this whole new generation of men who are openly gay who are out and now they want to become dads and and they're just it seems like a real groundswell of movement for for lesbians and gay men right now i think we have a different perception of ourselves you know we talk about people that were in heterosexual marriages found out about their orientation but had children within the context of that marriage and then you look at the dynamics of how they were as a parent because generally the heterosexual person kept the child and this gay father or mother was banished to a single world but now we are embracing that relationship with our offsprings so it's just a different a different awareness about ourselves and and getting in touch with our own wants and desires to parent still there's that mythology don't you find that that i mean new people in the community don't get it right away i don't think that they are going to be able to be parents that's because that's because they don't understand the politics and if you take a look at our community we are coming into our own we are starting to grow up and as we have grown up and as we have started not to believe in what we are being told in many cases and when the american psychiatric association uh said well maybe they are healthy or maybe they are not sick or maybe they are not sick right i i think we have come to recognize that we are just as good as we are just as capable of raising healthy children we have just as much love to give and as we are coming to grips with that as a community and understanding it then we do want those things i think there were a lot of us initially if you want to talk let's go back i'm older more than 15 years i think there were a lot of men and women out there part of our community that really explored having children but were afraid to they were afraid to because they bought into where society was at that point in time and where society was is you couldn't possibly raise healthy children who are not going to be scarred by this but we no longer believe that and not only do we no longer believe that i think there is a growing percentage of heterosexuals mental health professionals legislators people who can truly make a difference who also believe that and things are going to change hold that thought because i want to come back after the break and talk about enter right back into that discussion about the attitude of our community about people who had kids 15 years ago don't go away we'll be right back no matter how educational it is no matter how technologically advanced it may be no matter what you put in front of your kids to help them succeed it just doesn't mean a thing unless you're right there behind them join america's principles in helping students succeed call your kid's school today hi welcome back to get used to it i'm sheila cuell and today as i hope you already know we're talking about uh adoption in our gay and lesbian community and by extension our ability to form families we'll probably be talking about marriage and i don't know what all we'd be talking about because we've got three wonderful guests roberta bennett who's an attorney a certified family law specialist and a pioneer in same-sex couple adoptions um really a divorce attorney but uh we'll talk about the gay stuff today stephanie farrington doming who is the director of community outreach at the gay and lesbian community services center in la and dr greg travis who works with gay male fathers and want to be fathers and men who want to participate in surrogate parenting is that what we call it i guess so welcome back welcome back before the break we were talking about uh what were we talking about we were talking about how as the community comes more into its own we are willing to get out there and explore areas we were not willing to explore before such as having children well but i remember 15 years ago there was kind of an antagonism in much of the lesbian community toward lesbian moms women who already had kids there was no child care anywhere it was kind of anti-feminist in a way i went to a conference in orange county 400 lesbian moms showed up and their main complaint was there was no support in the community they were being called breeders god forbid they should want to have children if they didn't already have them did you find anything like that or to be honest we really didn't because diane and i created such a wonderful network of extended family in the gay and lesbian community that we didn't encounter much of that and of course our extended family were men and women who welcomed our four children into their lives but i think that if you take a look at what was happening 10 years ago 15 years 20 years ago most of the children came from heterosexual unions and there were divorces so there was already uh some amount of distrust not so sure from the young woman who had never been with a man and yes there there was the you know breeder uh we don't know what you are but you can't be a lesbian because you have children it was almost that mentality and there was almost that belief system out there also i think we were trying to differentiate ourselves a lot from heterosexuals i mean we didn't have a separate gay or lesbian identity really that we understood and one of the ways that we were trying to do that was well i'm not going to be one of them i'm not sure what i am but i'm not that and i think that was something that took us a while to kind of come out of again maybe as an aspect of the maturation of the community well i think that that's true and now we're talking about the the rights to marry and again if you want to talk about any system that is truly filled the heterosexual community in many many ways marriage is it and yet i take a look at it i'm a divorce attorney if marriages are recognized in our community i'm really going to be very rich and the reason i'm going to be very rich is because such a high percentage of these unions do not work not and i don't expect that percentage to really be any higher or any lower in the gay and lesbian we'll just have more divorces we'll have more we'll have more marriages we'll have more divorces and we'll have more children being separated in some fashion uh and shared between two parents whether they're parents of the same sex or different you hear that discussion within our community too about well this is a heterosexual system that's surely failed them and why are we buying into that why are we even concerned but then it goes further it's about our rights our basic civil rights that should we choose to enter into this relationship we should have the right to do that and what we're talking about are really legal marriages not so much the religious ceremonial thing that gets superimposed on it but pristine legal marriages legal unions well it's so freighted with symbolism i mean the the the whole thing we were talking about about having children it was weighted with symbolism you had somehow become tainted by the heterosexual something or other you've been in that marriage and you had children and that was part of the reason why in the old days people were that's that and we're us and we're different and we're going to be different and the men were certainly far more different but also in the olden days we did not embrace our visibility there's a big change in how we look at ourselves and and and want to express ourselves and take our space whereas 20 30 years ago it was completely different when i look at connecting elders in our gay and lesbian community they lived a closeted lifestyle that that is so unfamiliar to many of us today so i have a problem in connecting and bringing them into the gay and lesbian center with banners and the triangle on the front of the building and that that puts parameters on them that are very uncomfortable to them so you used a a phrase you said well when when diane and i made friends or we did this so your friends found you as a unit already that's correct and and and that's one way of family now we have young independent lesbian and gay men who are are are seeking what what their options are going to be and and seeking out their own definition of themselves and what their families will be so it's a little different and then we clump it all into the greater gay and lesbian experience but we're at different and varying points on this continuum of what we are to be and what we are as family so there's a lot of we hear the conversation about breeders and it's it's almost as though each step of the way in our struggle we kind of banter back and forth or take the liberty to poke at each other which is the same thing we see when we see pete wilson vetoing and saying no i'm going to make you less than we're right and you're going to be the wrong one in this and and we kind of do that fortunately we kind of box our way out of that and and my message to pete would be you know we're here we're queer and there are plenty more of us get used to it and we're going to vote and you better get used to it and you know we've got a new perception about who we are so um well it's an interesting notion of i was going to ask you about these the same notion that we're exploring of steps our community is taking these steps and not all at the same time but the more examples you see um you know you go to the pta meeting and there's another couple there you didn't even know them you know and another gay couple or lesbian couple um and now we say okay i am going to allow my community to embrace whoever it is individually you have kids i won't have kids you being a couple i won't be in a couple whatever it is and we'll be part of the community and we'll accept that but we will not be criticizing each other right is that a kind of a movement that you've seen which i do think is as you mentioned before that the maturing of the the larger gay and lesbian community i i believe and hope is allowing for more options that it's not you just have to be the party-hearty you know young attractive gay or lesbian person out there that there's just you can be coupled you can be singled you can the desire for children without someone being a threat or being seen as a cop-out that you're taking over the the hetero sexist kind of ideals and that's what i've heard a lot and yet there's just a growing number of people who are sort of saying but it feels real good to be a couple it feels real natural and important to go out and be a parent and doing a tremendous things to become a parent especially for gay men i just want to get back to something you said i've been thinking about it for gay men to be parents there's no mistake and they have to do tremendous amounts of soul-searching tremendous amounts of hiring attorneys without without question oftentimes consulting with psychologists or social workers i'm doing a lot of effort so i wonder for gay for gay men who are parents and are couples what the divorce rate would look like i mean this is just something i had to wonder about would it be the same as for heterosexuals i know a lot of heterosexuals think long and hard about being parents but oftentimes not not the same amount of energy that it would take for for a gay man or for lesbian you're you're assuming that the fact that there are children involved in this union is going to make a difference on whether people stay together or not and i think maybe 20 years ago 10 years ago even that was the case but i'm finding that and certainly in my practice less and less because the pendulum has swung and now psychologists and psychiatrists are telling us you don't stay in a bad relationship and you're going to do more damage to your kids if you do that right then you separate so yeah i think it's going to take different messages about that than our straight friends do when our straight friends are in a marriage and one of them says you know i'm not really very happy in this marriage i bet you and i know it's my experience people say to them well but you know you really ought to talk about it etc in our community not always and then none of this is absolute but in our community there's a lot more encouragement not to stay together you're not happy you know i mean less we don't even respect i don't yeah that's the word respect there is less traditionally there has been less respect in our community for our own relationships and our own family units but i think even that is changing and what we are seeing is all right so we have the hawaii case and maybe we're going to be able to get married legally somewhere or certainly within the next one or two decades but what are we doing right now we are getting married it's not a legal marriage but we're getting married our rabbis our priests our reference they're performing these ceremonies all the time they are unions and the people who participate them to participate in them are very serious about them as far as they are concerned they are married and they don't care what the state says well let's talk about hawaii for a minute because there are some differences in what the state says if they were to condone our marriages certainly there'd be differences in our expectations we don't know whether i mean we could have stepparent adoptions if we could marry maybe although there would still be that other person you know involved we guess we're certainly exploring new ground here uh community property would be a big change i mean i can't tell you how many people i know when their relationship breaks up the more wealthy partner goes oh i'm so glad there's no community property i don't have to give that person anything you know which i think is very irresponsible spousal support child support or shared custody with the children right right right well with the adoptions right now although we haven't done any great deal of nothing's gone up to the appellate level but with the adoption if in fact you have two legal parents even without benefit of marriage that will give the either parent even if one's biological and one's the adoptive parent either parent can come in and petition the court the family law courts to determine a custody suit so what do we get if we marry we get the property we get benefits and responsibilities we get civil rights yes why is this definitely explore that for me because we're equal i mean this is the last bastion this is what they hold out this is what we can't have and if we have that you know as i said before there's not the heterosexual privilege any longer they don't get to make us the less than they're arguing that if we're allowed to marry it's going to somehow diminish the value of heterosexual marriage i heard that in the assembly not two days ago i mean i think i can't imagine that's the the dumbest argument i've ever heard well they're they're faltering and you know they're trying to come up with something stronger you know but i think you know even in looking at this you know i was going to say to you a while back i think it's really interesting that the religious right and the radical right who had no use for our african-american communities you know they want to move as far out on the limb and as far away from us as they can get they are now coming down in our african-american community to make alliances with our churches which are always considered the cornerstone of our community and and certainly an institution that we are at odds with and they further want to come down and drive that stake between our families and and and turn our churches against us firmly which pushes us farther away we start looking at the notion of family so as we're trying to create our own family they're fighting and and even disenfranchising or separating us from our legal families you know so well they even use black ministers to come up and testify against our bills oh yeah fervently about how we're not human and we're not a real minority you know as though they i know they weren't in birmingham in 1963 when the white ministers were standing in the doors of churches saying you're not human get out of my church bible says you know racist should never mix i think it's important for people to see how these things are similar and how denying someone the ability to form a family legally is the same as saying you're not human and if you're not human we can discriminate against you they treat you anyway destroy you in some ways and and destroy your own esteem well how do our own parents respond to this too i mean they grew up in a world where they learned traditional family values and tried to pass them on i think it's very difficult for most parents initially unless they came to the recognition much earlier than their own child which oftentimes happens but you know i i think that probably from the experience and talking with so many people in our community that parents usually do come around uh they might not embrace their child's lifestyle and but they still love their child and it may take them a while to get there but i think eventually they do get there and some come to some kind of an uneasy truce some of them join parents and friends of gays uh and some of them just treat it like well okay fine it's interesting i'm sorry with the gay dads i've been interviewing when they talk about how their parents are responding to their being parents and sort of the controversial or or fascinating way that they are becoming parents so far it's been unanimous they're thrilled that the parents are just so excited to have grandchildren and in some cases it is their first and only grandchild so i mean it's it's who knows how this is going to affect the coming out process for families for children for everybody with the aspect of that the right the option of being a parent is no longer having to be exercised nor having to be uh completely cut out that is just a part of the human experience part of the human option but these i would imagine our parents who have already grappled with the issue of their child being gay in the first place and soon as they found out the parent probably says oh i'm never going to be your grandmother so that exactly so that is where we were as a community 15 years ago so what and then when they find out they are going to be a grandparent they are delighted because they know that their son can be a wonderful loving warm affectionate father and it seems for some people that's all they need what about the parent of the non-biological parent you know what i mean do they feel like a grandparent to that kid that's the other one's biological cancer my mother has been that it hasn't been that way and when you talk in terms of parents saying maybe i'm not comfortable with your orientation but you're my kid and i love you and and you having that sense that the parent is really there for you and loving has not been my experience my mother has passed away a few years back but i had a very serious discussion i vowed that i would not let my father leave planet earth without us talking about this issue and it was a very painful situation my father's mother happens to be a lesbian so he was like bookends i mean where do i go he's checking himself so but he he has problems with that he has problems and i keep saying well maybe time will be the great healer and we'll move on from there and it'll get better and we'll come together haven't seen it yet late breaking news at 11. but you know i'm hopeful so they didn't have a relationship with sandy or with the relationship uh is that they knew her they knew them um we went along what really drove the stake is when sandy and i decided to have a holy union and we were going to validate our relationship and commitment to each other and this brought out all the bible verses it my father who was everything was okay except when it came now it was me it was different he's this is the father who gave me an autographed book from rita mae brown his friend you know and all of a sudden yeah dan and i'm a lesbian too you know so it changes i'm hoping he's going to evolve you know but it's crazy so i think within within my community i experience it more in the greater gay and lesbian community that parents are become real accepting and and hey you're my kid bottom line my experience has been a little different and if you've got them down thumping the bible and and all the right coming in saying hey they you know it makes it difficult for people to move beyond those positions that they've taken so how about your kids do they have a bunch of grandparents uh they actually do if you talk about nick who is the grandson we adopted he has well he has three well he doesn't it's kind of hard to explain and he has a lot of fun with this but our adult children are his aunts and uncles biologically but now legally they're her the brothers and sisters and he has more grandparents and heinz has pickles and he has a relationship with his biological father and his biological mother and he just i don't know as a seven-year-old how he puts it all together but he has and the school's very supportive and he just has a wonderful time with it all well you know there are times in our community when the uh a lesbian couple will decide that they want to have a child but the they want the sperm donor not to be a sperm donor they want to be a gay couple and they're going to have four parents of this kid and we're all going to bring them up together and the question is how's this child going to respond and the answer is he'll get twice as many presents and be really happy absolutely interesting if you want to go back to a minute to the the policy that governor wilson wilson actually vetoed it the the last part of the policy if i remember it correctly said nothing here in is to say that any child can have three legal parents so they did address that issue very clearly in the new policy that's been rescinded so as an attorney i wonder if right now i could push through an adoption where there were three parents you know if we were martian anthropologists we would say if the human race was really smart they would let people contract to be parents in any number in any group because if if a child is loved that child can only do better by being more loved and more loved and that's why we have aunts and uncles and grandparents etc and certainly legal responsibility would really help i'm just thinking my own experience as a as a small kid my my dad was married three times i was from his second wife i grew up genealogy was just something that is my it was what i understood it was very simple for me to understand and i grew up understanding steps half this or whatever it just was so easy because i grew up with it i think it's the same thing that we're talking about here from the view point of view of a child growing up with same-sex parents or two couples though i think a lot of people think that must be detrimental because it seems so odd and weird for me the adult to comprehend the reality is most children if given love support guidance all these just basic necessary things that a parent should give or parents should give to any child the healthiest of the healthy set of serial families that we find after divorce oh all the time and had heterosexual families this this this is this is nothing new i am doing divorces now for people i'm working on their fourth divorce and there's lots of of children but what i have found with with children in my practice and it's exactly what you're talking about if that child is loved if you're giving those children the right message we care about you we're here for you don't pay any attention to what we do we've messed it up that has nothing to do with how much we love you and we're going to be here for you those kids are going to be fine you talk about some of the craziest on the face of the custodial arrangements in the world and the kids doing great why is the kid doing great because the mother and the father think this is the greatest custody plan in the world and that's how the child feels and they love it they're secure they love the kid well i wonder whether whether marriage will make a difference in the way people see us our own families for instance i wonder how your dad of course this would have been yet another thing to cope with but supposing the state had said no no we think this is okay because we're going to allow them to marry and instead of it being a an alternative you know commitment ceremony we're not domestic partners we're going to be we're having a wedding a real wedding and the state is going to say these people are married you know and stephanie can adopt and be a co-parent a real legal coherent maybe of this young woman maybe maybe because there there's a country right now that recognizes and performs same-sex couple marriages but one of the rights the same-sex couple does not have is to adopt a child so who knows what's going to happen here we don't know well the country probably does it for itself as much as it does it for us you know this notion of security that the family unit is a unit of security in a country well i think what's so unique about the the marriage situation in in hawaii is they actually have um a bill that that that says that you cannot discriminate on the basis of gender so to have a legal marriage uh established within that state is going to be different than what we experience in amsterdam where it's similar but different and that they don't have the right to adopt and i think that speaking to what you asked earlier about what if this happened and the states did sanction this i think it would expedite be get used to it period or to get over it period because even the bible tells you to obey the laws of your land so those who are are caught in that crux now have i guess a little freedom to then embrace members of their family if they shut out before because they are in fact being the laws of the land so in certain states it was against the law for a long period of time for a black to marry a white that's right now it's no longer against the law and there are still some people who will see a mixed racial family walking down the street and look and they have some feelings about this but you know what get used to it this is it all right we'll get there too there's a good guy we'll get there too that's sorry would you actually there's a culture there are more and more people who are marrying across religious religious lines uh racial relations absolutely and i think we have a certain uh cultural sophistication in that like you said we may have feelings about it but that's right we don't act on those feelings and um that's that's all with being politically correct and and and our demeanor in the workspace and your prejudices at home right but if the law is taken as an expression of the opinion of morality in the state which always lags 20 years behind what's really happening but there it says you know what this is a good thing this is what happened with contraception which was totally excoriated with very much of the same language that we hear about ourselves now you know the devil's work all kind of non-reproductive sex contraception abortion and us were always excoriated now public opinion has changed the law allows it so it's okay and i think that this is the place where we find the reason for the greatest barriers they don't want us to have it because once we have it if we are legal then we will be okay but we bring a different sensitivity to it i mean just being a lesbian and and dealing with the attitudes the adverse attitudes uh the knowledge that there are people that are thinking that that i'm less than and getting beyond that to embrace my full expression of who i am and realizing that i am not less than for gay lesbian reasons or black white reasons um i bring a certain quality of life experiences into my parenting situation i bring a victory of getting over the bs and and knowing that there's light at the end of the tunnel and moving ahead and waking up in the morning and saying damn it this world is mine too and uh going out and taking on the day you know i'm gonna close the show with that because not only are we out of time but it's a it's a wonderful expression i want to thank all three of you i want to thank you for watching uh it's been interesting it's been wonderful the future i think is ours and what i say to you and the rest of the world get used to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you