Metal Brigham

Last night we attended the rally up at the capitol regarding the adoption bill. It's being held in committee where its opponents hope it will die. We want it to be debated and voted on, even though it doesn't stand much of a chance.
The problem is most up there will look at this bill and see it as giving rights to gay people, the equivalent of tattooing the bill on the back of a drunk Wiccan leper in a legislature of so many Ultra-conservative LDS lawmakers. In actuality this bill is more about helping people who are neither gay or lesbian.

So many of our Utah children, even when raised by two loving and wonderful parents, can only have one legal parent in this state because of the current adoption law, leaving them with far fewer rights than other children when it comes to items such as getting on their breadwinner's health insurance or keeping both their parents legally responsible for, say, child support. Some of our friends have children where a fraction are legally attached to both parents and their younger siblings, born or adopted under this law, only have one legal parent. You can imagine the legal mess they're in. Instead Utah tax payers pick up some of the slack when something bad happens in these families... and that's the difference between conservatism and wacky social conservatism :-): they'd rather the state pay than a child have two legal parents, both with personal responsibilities to be held to.

Utah is in fact one of the top 5 in the US in the percentage of same-sex headed households also raising children, and gay people can still adopt here as single people and they do. These laws do nothing measurable to stop gay parenting. So many children are in need of homes and they just cannot stop families from forming, even when they legally hobble them. But, yeah, most lawmakers will only see in this bill "gay=bad", and come next year these kids will still only have one legal parent. I'm just grateful we are both our boys' parents by heart, mind, and law, even though our legal route hasn't yet been tested in Utah (and I hope we're not here the day it is tested).

Anyway, the twins were just goofing off but I thought this picture was kind of funny:

Like Brian, we're up there, with our dukes up, trying to fight the deaf, 12 foot tall, metal Brigham Young, Utah's beloved founder and symbol of tradition. I bet he shoots lasers from his eyes too.

There would not be enough room in Brigham's corner of the capitol to also fit the metal forms of his 50-something wives (or is that "civil partners"?), but we're the controversial ones :-).