U.S. Rep.'s plea for LGBTQ+ couples right to adopt

Emotional Speech about LGBTQ+ Parents Adopting

Representative Maloney’s Story

On February 27th, Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY) urged the Committee on Oversight and Reform to fight against the Trump administration’s proposition to allow adoption and foster agencies to deny LGBTQ+ families. He shared his own story of how he adopted three children, rescuing them from devastating circumstances.

“It was because they [Adoption Alliance] had learned in the 1990s that there were certain types of kids who are not going to be adopted, where the circumstances of their birth, through no fault of their own obviously, was difficult or confronting for traditional adoptive parents, where there were issues of HIV or rape or incest, sometimes mixed with concerns about interracial adoption. And what these adoption agencies learned, to their credit, was that there were LGBT couples in cities like New York who would say yes to these children, not as an alternative to the straight couple that was going to raise them. As an alternative to never being adopted. Because no one was going to adopt these kids. And it was that insight, that LGBT couples were willing to cross lines of difference because they had experienced doing so in their own lives, that they had less preoccupation or hysteria with things like HIV, that they were more willing to adopt across lines of difference like race or religion, that there was an opportunity for kids that would not have a home to have a home,” Representative Maloney tells Representative Jody Hice (R-GA).

”Good parents are good parents”

Representative Maloney hopes that by sharing his and his partner’s experience with adoption that it will persuade Congress from approving any “license to discriminate” laws that would allow federally funded organizations to deny LGBTQ+ parents and parents of different religions from adopting solely because of their “lack” of Christian values.

Brut.