A new study has found that one in five foster youth in Los Angeles are LGBTQ — which means they are over-represented compared to LGBTQ youth in the general population. They’re also twice as likely to report being treated poorly and twice as likely to live in a group facility compared to non-LGBTQ youth. But a bold project is working on a new model of caring for LGBTQ foster youth, in L.A. and across the country — and it needs your help.
Republican lawmakers, with the urging of anti-LGBT groups the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation, have introduced a bill last week that would allow adoption providers and other child welfare service agencies to refuse to provide services that conflict with their “sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Think it’s a thinly veiled attempt to stop LGBT people from adopting or fostering? You’re right. But an opposing bill that would withhold federal funds from adoption providers that discriminate against LGBT people now has record support — although it is far from passage.
May is National Foster Care Month, and I’ve been enjoying many of the recent stories of foster families at RaiseAChild.US. Read on for links to their tales and to other information resources for LGBTQ foster families.
November is National Adoption Month, and the Family Equality Council has launched the “Allies for Adoption” campaign to raise awareness of a very simple thing we could do to help more children in foster care find forever homes: remove the barriers that prevent qualified LGBT people from adopting children.
Michigan legislators on the state House Committee on Families, Children, and Seniors have passed three bills that would give taxpayer-funded adoption agencies the right to deny an adoption placement based on that agency’s moral or religious beliefs. This is an anti-LGBT bill, no doubt about it — but it is the children needing homes who will suffer the most. . Here’s what you can do to help stop these bills from going any further.
Three same-sex couples yesterday challenged Nebraska’s ban on gay men and lesbians becoming foster parents. One of the couples — and the five children they adopted out of foster care in California, where they previously lived — were the subject of a documentary a few years ago. Read my interview with the filmmaker and see a trailer after the jump, and learn more about the dads who are clearly continuing to do good for their family and others.
The New York City Administration for Children’s Services has launched a new, citywide campaign for adoptive and foster parents, including LGBT parents and those affirming of LGBT youth.
A new study from the U.K. found that gay and lesbian adoptive families are as successful as straight ones—another piece of “we could have told you that” research, perhaps, but nevertheless invaluable for convincing those who need further convincing about these things.
Any Day Now, the new feature film starring Alan Cumming and Garret Dillahunt as a gay couple in the 1970s who foster a teenager with Down Syndrome, is a refreshing reminder that LGBT families have a long history of coming together in unexpected ways, against the odds. Other recent fictional portrayals of LGBT parenting have focused on upper-middle class families, deliberately becoming parents and secure in their parental rights. Not so here.
Foster children do equally well no matter the sexual orientation of their parents, a new study has found. While many of us might have guessed as much (or known from the evidence of our own lives), research like this continues to provide necessary hard evidence to convince courts, politicians, and others that our families deserve to be treated with equal respect and legal recognition.
