Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

But let's be serious for a moment. This ad is not actually about gay marriage; it's about the separate (albeit connected) issue of gay adoption, which is a pet issue of mine. I think arguments against gay adoption are even uglier than arguments against gay marriage, if for no other reason than any attack on gay adoption is inevitably a slap in the faces of single parents across the nation. After all, if having two mothers or fathers is such a horrible thing for children, it stands to reason that having only one mother or father is even worse.

And a compassionate society would not deliberately deny a child a mother or a father.

Because if there's anyone who understands compassion, it's Dr. James Dobson.

I actually agree with that statement, though not in the way FoF meant it. It is awful to deny a child a mother or a father. It's just awful when a compassionate society considers a group of people to be so aberrant that they would rather children drift through life without any parents than have a loving home with those icky, dirty people.

Now, I don't want this to come across as an attack on the perfectly fine foster families in this country. But I think we can all agree that it's better for a child to have a stable family (in whatever configuration that that family may have) than to be drifting through the foster care system. Especially in some states.

When the disappearance of a 5-year-old girl from her Miami foster home four years ago went unnoticed for months, the ensuing scandal that engulfed Florida's child-welfare agency led to recriminations and promises of beefed-up efforts to track down children who went missing from state care.

A few months later, Gov. Jeb Bush and his social-services chief declared "success," saying the state had found all but 102 of about 400 foster children who had gone missing.
That was Dec. 17, 2002.

Yet as of Monday, the number of kids missing from the state's troubled child-welfare system has skyrocketed to 652, most of them runaway teens and youngsters snatched from foster care by their biological parents. The number of missing kids has risen even as the number of kids in state care has declined.

Child advocates say the state continues to fail miserably in efforts to safeguard or return missing kids - even neglecting to register the children with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the national clearinghouse for abducted and runaway kids.

"People look for their pets with greater concern," said Howard Talenfeld, a Fort Lauderdale attorney who is president of Florida's Children First. "There's no urgency to finding these missing children. But the kids are out on the streets. They are getting raped. They are getting hurt. Some have been murdered. Yet the state still doesn't pursue this with the kind of urgency that is necessary."

You know things are going badly when a state declares success after "only" losing 102 children.

I would love to talk to the person responsible for this campaign. I would love to meet the man or woman responsible for writing things like:

The only sure protection for marriage--and our kids--is the Marriage Protection Amendment.

And I would love to ask that individual how he can dare write about things like compassion when he apparently believes that it's better for a child to have no family at all than to have two good parents who (God forbid) happen to have the same set of genitals.