When Father's Day is a double celebration

Link: msnbc.com

Excerpt:

SEATTLE - They don’t greet you so much as they burst upon you, these three little guys with impish grins that punctuate their beautiful dark features. Here they come, a rumbling, tumbling, laughing, yelling, skipping, crying pack of naughty and nice, snips and snails and puppy dog tails and everything else that is American boyhood.

Meet the Brothers Z: 4-year-old twins Zach and Zayn, and their younger sibling Zeth, fast approaching 3. In many ways, they are typical denizens of the hilly suburban neighborhood where they have lived most of their lives. They spend their days in preschool while their parents both work in the telecom industry. The family owns an SUV and a pickup. They shop at Costco and go to church on Sundays. They work in the yard. They watch Disney movies on their big-screen TV.

But Father’s Day will be a double celebration at their house because the brothers have two daddies — Geoffery and Devin, foster parents for the boys for three years before adopting them.

“All we’re trying to do is raise three healthy boys to be participants in society,” said Geoffery, Devin’s partner for a decade.

That’s a modest description for what the county judge who finalized the adoption in December called an act of heroism. The boys, taken from substance-abusing and incarcerated biological parents, faced long odds against growing up together. Given their treatment by the birth parents, there were far more questions than answers about physical and emotional issues that might arise for them down the road.

"You are heroes in our community," Judge Mary Yu said, beaming from the bench while the boys frolicked about the courtroom, the whole family decked out in red-and-white Mickey Mouse ski sweaters. “Who’s going to assume the burden of taking care of children like this, children who possibly have been neglected or set aside in some way? … People like you, who step up. Thank you.”

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Empowered by marriage ceremony
In 2004, when a county in the neighboring state of Oregon began allowing gay marriages, they rushed to Portland to tie the knot. Although Oregon voters later nullified those marriages with a constitutional ban, the ceremony “was kind of empowering for us, to feel that we really were a family,” Devin recalled. Their union has since been recorded under Washington’s 2007 domestic partner registry, which gives them many — but far from all — of the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

Their musings about adding children to their family turned into action six months later when, having ruled out a surrogate birth, Devin went online to research adoption and found a 3-year-old boy who “looked just like Geoffery.” They were told by adoption counselors that the boy would certainly be spoken for by the time they went through the application process, and he was, but “he was the catalyst that started the process,” says Geoffery.

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“Where do the (foster) children come from?” Geoffery asked. “They come from dysfunctional, broken, heterosexual families. … If you took all of the children away from gay and lesbian parents in the United States today, what would the foster system look like?”

A recent national study by the Urban Institute and the Williams Institute at UCLA actually put a price tag on that: “A national ban on gay, lesbian and bisexual foster care could cost from $87 million to $130 million. Costs to individual states could ranges from $100,000 to $27 million.”

The Family Equality Council, an advocacy group for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender families, reports that gay and lesbian parents are currently raising 4 percent of all adopted children in the United States, or 65,500 out of 1.6 million. Nationwide, gays and lesbians are raising 3 percent of all foster kids, or 14,100 out of 500,000, the council says. The top five states in terms of kids adopted by same-sex parents are California, with 16,458; New York, 7,042; Massachusetts, 5,828; Texas, 3,588; and Washington, 3,004.

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[jw]