Hot Topic: McCain on Gay Adoption

(Getty Images) If you haven't heard by now, Senator John McCain was asked about gay adoption this past Friday night in an interview with the New York Times.  Below was the transcript, as taken from their Web site:

Q: President Bush believes that gay couples should not be permitted to adopt children. Do you agree with that?

Mr. McCain: I think that we've proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no I don't believe in gay adoption.

Q: Even if the alternative is the kid staying in an orphanage, or not having parents?

Mr. McCain: I encourage adoption and I encourage the opportunities for people to adopt children I encourage the process being less complicated so they can adopt as quickly as possible. And Cindy and I are proud of being adoptive parents.

Q: But your concern would be that the couple should a traditional couple.

Mr. McCain: Yes.

If you have 5 minutes right now, listen to the audio of the interview by clicking here.  (Note – the gay adoption part starts roughly at the 8 minute mark, lasts for just 3 minutes or so).

To be perfectly honest here, I couldn't care less what Senator McCain thinks about the current "hot issue" of same-sex marriage.  He's against it, and I expect him to be against it.  But how on earth he could be against the notion of gays and lesbians being able to adopt is simply mind boggling to me. 

He says:  "I encourage adoption and I encourage the opportunities for people to adopt children I encourage the process being less complicated so they can adopt as quickly as possible." 

I don't get it.  If McCain is so concerned about making the process of adoption easy, wouldn't it make more sense to legally allow gays and lesbians to adopt rather institute/reinforce a law that would prevent them from legally doing so?

Here is where I wish the reporter had pushed a little harder. The reporter had a golden opportunity here to cut to the heart of this matter with something like, "Well so what you are saying here as the possible future President of the United States is that you think millions of children should spend their entire lives in orphanages, rather than to allow them be adopted by loving parents who happen to be gay or lesbian?  If so, what is the exact benefit of that?"

And for those not swayed by the heart, an economic argument could be made to appeal to McCain's fiscal conservatives. I mean, this is a perfect example of shifting a major cost from the public sector to the private. You'd think they'd be happy to save the money spent on housing abandoned and orphaned kids, especially those with disabilities which gets very expensive, and obviously the fewer kids in the system, the smaller the bureaucracy. If gays want to spend their money on these kids, you'd think the government would be happy to take us up on it.

Look -- I can almost live with the reality that same-sex marriage may never happen in this country.  But to me, the much more offensive issue is someone telling gays and lesbians that they should be forbidden from improving a child's life and providing a safe home where they can be healthy, happy and thrive. 

Even my parents get it: they are true-blue Republicans, supporters of McCain, and very, very WASP.  That said, my adult life as a gay man is not exactly discussed when I call home or go to visit.  There is no doubt in my mind how much my parents and siblings absolutely love and adore me, they'd just prefer to not address or discuss my sexuality until the end of time.   This unspoken rule works in my family, and believe it or not, we're all very close -- as long as we don't discuss the gay thing.

Given the above, my parents left me a voicemail last summer that I never would have expected to hear. I saved it and this was the message verbatim:

Mom: Hi Clarke!  Your father and I just saw the most amazing thing.  We were walking on the boardwalk and we saw two fat -- and I mean really fat -- women, but that's not it.  The one fat woman was pushing a little boy in a wheelchair, and he was about 9 years old and he was black.  The other woman who wasn't quite as fat was carrying a little Asian girl who definitely had Downs Syndrome on one arm, and holding the hand of a little boy who was blind with her other arm!  He was definitely blind because he had a stick.  Anyway, nothing made sense and then your father said the women must have been a lesbian couple and that they'd adopted the kids! 

Dad (on the other phone): Hi.   I didn't think they were lesbians because they were fat, I just assessed the situation.

Mom: So we went up and talked to them and Daddy was right -- they said they'd adopted the kids, and they told us that it took them almost three years to adopt these children -- these severely handicapped children that nobody else would ever have wanted  -- just because they were gay.  They told us the whole story and it's just... sickening.

Dad:  I can tell you right now that if these ladies did not adopt these kids, there is no way anyone else would have.  Anyway, we wanted you to know that we're going to start supporting this issue.

Mom:  Call us back!

Trust me, that was a big step for them and we've since discussed the issue of gay adoption.   The issue is important to me on a political level, but also meaningful to me because it's the one issue that sort of opened the "gay dialogue" door with my folks.  They don't get gay marriage, and I look at them as representing the many opponents to it that aren't zealots but have a genuine disconnect with the concept.

But when it comes to kids, there's no room for ideology, and they understood immediately that this is an issue that should be a non-issue. There are thousands of hurt, struggling children that didn't get what they needed from their straight parents who will be left to suffer the further indignities of a fundamentally flawed system. Why not let a gay couple take on this wonderful burden? (Trust me, McCain, it's not the gays who abuse kids or sell them on the internet or lock them in cages.) We're not talkin' Mid-East Peace Talks here, we are talkin' common sense, and if McCain can't see collective value in allowing loving adults who happen to be gay from literally saving a child's life - well, I don't even think my parents could vote for him.

Originally posted by Clarke Hamlin