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Essay on Gay Adoption
"Hold on a second, I need to just send my kid away here," says Sean Kershaw, who has a toddler demanding his attention. If an impatient 2-year-old could personify America's debate over adoption by gays and lesbians, it would be Aidan. The odd set of circumstances by which Aidan came to his parents, two gay men, underscores the disparate attitudes that exist toward gay parenting, not to mention the dramatic lengths some gay men and lesbians have to go to in order to become adoptive parents.
Three years ago, Kershaw and his partner, Tim Hawkins, who live in St. Paul, Minn., were in the final stages of adopting what would have been their first child, a 4-year-old, through the local foster care system. At the last possible moment in the legal process, that boy's foster parents balked at the prospect of allowing gay men to raise their child and adopted the boy themselves. But as fate would have it, across town and within weeks, a birth couple decided they did want their newborn to have two adoptive dads and furthermore pegged Kershaw and Hawkins as the dads of their choice. The newborn was Aidan--to whom, of course, none of this presently matters. What does matter is Kershaw's immediate attention, which Aidan must have, interviews regarding the state of gay and lesbian adoption be damned. "Tim!" Kershaw pleads, asking his partner for relief.
It's far too early to know what long-lasting effect Rosie O'Donnell's coming out as the most visible gay parent in the country will have on the issue of gay adoption But what is certain is that O'Donnell has brought the issue to living rooms and kitchen tables across the country and in the process has shone a spotlight on the sometimes hotly debated topic. But the moral give-and-take over gay adoption overlies the much more convoluted questions......
