U.S. Representative Angie Craig (D-MN), the first out lesbian mom—and grandmother—in Congress, announced her campaign for Senate Tuesday and cited her legal struggle to be a parent as evidence of her ability to fight despite long odds.
Craig first won election to the U.S. House from Minnesota in 2018, but has long championed the rights of queer parents. Back in 1997, she and her then-partner Debra Langston had struggled to adopt a child when they were living in Tennessee. Same-sex couples could not adopt jointly at the time, so only one of them could be the legal parent. Additionally, although the birth mother of the child they hoped to adopt wanted them to do so, the birth mother’s own parents tried to claim custody instead. A three-year court battle ensued, which Craig and Langston ultimately won, a landmark ruling that helped other queer people be able to adopt in the state. Craig and her current wife Cheryl Greene now have four grown sons.
In a 2021 video that she made with Family Equality, she shared more about her difficult journey to parenthood, saying, “When you wake up every day for three years of your life, not knowing whether the child you’re raising is going to stay with you for one more day, it changes you as a person. That experience was the most painful of my life.” To other parents experiencing similar discrimination, she said, “You have an ally in Congress who understands the fear and the uncertainty that you’re going through as a parent.” And she told LGBTQ youth that she would fight for legislation to help them find loving homes.
In the video that dropped this week to announce her campaign to run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota, she spoke against the current president “trampling our rights and freedoms” and asserted, “It’s time to fight back.” She knows what it’s like to be the underdog, she said, from growing up in a mobile home park raised by a single mother, to working her way through college, to winning a formerly Republican congressional seat, to how she and Cheryl “fought like hell to be parents of our four wonderful boys as some people, even a state government, tried to stop us.”
But she added, “They keep underestimating us and we keep winning.”
Watch that full video below: