Anti-Gay Adoption Bill is moved forward by Kentucky Senators in Secret Vote

In a surprise meeting announced as the Kentucky Senate adjourned for the day, a measure that would ban unmarried couples from adopting children or becoming foster parents in Kentucky, Senate Bill 68 (SB 68), was passed by the Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee and sent to the full Senate late last Thursday afternoon.

Introduced by Sen. Gary Tapp (R), SB 68 prohibits someone who is co-habiting with a sexual partner outside of marriage from becoming a foster parent, providing relative caregiver services, or adopting a child, and mirrors a law recently passed in Arkansas.

Sen. Tapp and supporters of SB 68 are saying that the purpose of the bill is to insure that children are placed into a home with a mother and father, however this bill does not ensure that children will be placed in homes with two parents. Singles would still be able to foster or adopt as before, just as long as they don’t live with an unmarried life partner.

Opponents of SB 68 say it is aimed in its totality at preventing Gay and Lesbians from adopting children in Kentucky and as such is motivated by nothing more than bigotry. They are calling last Thursday’s vote “legislation by ambush”, saying they received no notice of the special meeting and were afforded no chance to speak as a result. It also seemed a few of these opponents that the committee did really not want very many people around when they voted.

“I find it very interesting that this was a secret meeting that very few people knew about,” Hartman said. “This seems purposeful to exclude any real debate or discussion.”

Hartman told LGR Friday that he was in the Kentucky State House till the end of the sesssion Thursday and no notice of a committee meeting or a vote had been posted by the time he left.

However, David Edmunds, a policy analyst for Kentucky’s Family Foundation, who authored and supports the bill, was notified shortly beforehand of the meeting by Senator Tapp, and appeared with Tapp to speak on behalf of SB 68.

Committee Chair Sen. Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said there was no attempt to exclude anyone. But he said he couldn’t recall if he had attempted to notify anyone sooner of the subject of the meeting he announced at the end of the Senate session, as some senators were leaving for the day, but also says. “There was nothing sinister to it.”

However the committee Vice-Chair, who is opposed to SB 68, had no idea about the meeting even taking place on Thursday and was also not present during the vote.

LGR spoke the Kentucky American Civil Liberties Union in Louisville to see if this scheduling had possibly violated the Kentucky Open Meeting Law that states public business cannot be conducted in secret and that fair notice of a meeting effecting public policy must be given. However, the ACLU’s Mike Aldridge said that as a standing committee of the Kentucky Senate, the Judiciary Committee is exempted from this law.

“Apparently they change the schedule around on short notice quite a bit down there in Frankfort, sometimes for convenience and sometimes for nefarious purposes.” Aldridge said.

Aldridge would not speculate on the reason for this change.

Like many states, Kentucky faces a shortage of qualified foster and adoptive parents. It is also facing a budget crunch because of the economic downturn.

The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, a chronically under funded department that oversees adoption and fostering in Kentucky, is under a mandate to find prompt permanent and qualified placement in stable homes. To help the department do this, the state received a $2 million dollar federal grant to aid in finding foster and adoptive families for the state’s foster children.

We spoke with a source at the Cabinet today and were told as far as they know that neither Senator Tapp nor has anyone from the Family Foundation, the bills chief architects, ever spoken to anyone in that department about either SB 68 or the department’s funding issues.

Our source did say if Tapp had spoken with them, he would have been honestly told the department has in the past had very good results placing children, especially hard to place special needs children, with committed gay and lesbian couples, that the HFS staff just really wants to find homes for needing children, and that the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services really does not want to be part of anyone’s agenda, whatever that might be. They said more then likely the conversation would have very soon been turned to the department ever increasing work load and the fact that the Cabinet staff is not offered overtime because of legislative budget constraints, yet put in the extra time needed to meet that workload.

The Kentucky HFS source also said that if this bill were to pass, the job for HFS would only become that much more difficult and would probably result in the warehousing of even more kids in group homes at significant cost increases to the departments already strapped budget.

Recently the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law released a cost estimate of Kentucky Senate Bill 68. The report estimates that SB 68 would cost the state over $5.3 million in the first year of its implementation. It also suggests that 630 foster children would have to be removed from their current homes and placements plus would cause an additional, 85 children in foster care either not be adopted or remain in foster care at additional taxpayer expense.

When asked, my source at The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services said that the Williams Institute numbers were “pretty accurate” and that the taxpayer of Kentucky would indeed see “quite significant cost increases” in the area of child welfare and foster care if SB 68 were to pass.

While Senator Stivers is saying “there was nothing sinister’ in the scheduling of this vote, my source had to think that in a state where the taxpayers have been hit hard in the recent economic melt down and child welfare funding is already  at crisis levels, a politician voting to advance a bill that does not benefit the children of the state in anyway, while it adds the additional costs for their care to the taxpayer burden, and is being done all because someone has a personal bigotry against gays and lesbians would have a very good reason not to tell too many people you are about to do it.

Yes it could appear to even the most casual of observers, because of the overt bigotry involved with this bill, supporters on the committee really did not want look anyone in they eye as they voted on Thursday.

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 31a).

“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Jesus of Nazareth… Matthew 7:12, King James Version.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Kentucky Gays & Lesbians Won’t Give Up Adoption Without a Fight (queerty.com)
• Fla. Gay Adoption Ban Dealt Legal Blow (cbsnews.com)
• Economy enters same-sex marriage debate (cnn.com)
• Domestic Adoption in Struggling Economy (adoption.suite101.com)
• Judge overturns Florida ban on adoption by gays (cnn.com)