|
Thoughts from COLAGE prior to President Bush's State of the Union Address February 2nd , 2005 Dear President Bush, Here at COLAGE's national office we were disappointed to hear of recent events highlighting the Bush Administration's hostile attitude toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender (LGBT) people and families. Last week your education secretary, Margaret Spelling, decided to cancel an educational documentary because the main character in it visits the home of two lesbian parents. A few days ago you commented in an interview with the New York Times that "...the ideal is where a child be raised by a man and a woman. That's the ideal world. A married man and a woman." This was in response to a question about Florida's ban on LGBT adoption. Tonight, during your State of the Union address, many predict that you will speak out in favor of the discriminatory Marriage Protection Amendment which was recently reintroduced in the Senate despite its defeat last fall. In anticipation of tonight's state of the union address, we the staff of COLAGE (Children Of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere) are writing to share our ideal in the hopes that you will choose to respond to the real crises families in the United States face every day, rather than focusing on the inaccurate anti-family agenda of the far right wing of your party. We hope you will join us in creating a better future for all of the people to and for whom you are responsible. In your interview with the New York Times on January 28th, you describe your image of the ideal family as a married man and woman with children. However, that ideal accurately describes less than 25% of all American families. Despite not matching your 'ideal,' there are millions of families out there who work hard every day to create and sustain healthy and loving families. These families are headed by single parents; foster families; grandparents; they are blended or 'step' families; families headed by LGBTQ people; chosen families; families that live together and apart - there are at least as many family formations as there are families. You, the president of this country, have chosen to disparage all of these families, targeting LGBT families particularly, for not meeting your 'ideal' rather than applauding their courage and resilience in creating spaces for love and nurturance in a too-often hostile social and political atmosphere. As the national organization that represents the millions of children, youth and adults who have one or more LGBT parents or guardians, COLAGE too has an ideal when we think of what makes a family. We believe that the common denominator of what children need from their families is the following: a caring, stable, and responsible adult or set of adults who have made a life-long commitment to nurture and guide the young people they are parenting. Even this ideal cannot work without other ideals that COLAGE deeply values: that all families receive support and validation from their community; that they have equal access to legal protections, financial security, a healthy environment and opportunities for growth, health, education, housing and employment; that, on a very basic level, every member of a family has the resources they need to survive and thrive. At COLAGE, we have been, to say the least, deeply disappointed when measuring your administration's record against our ideal so far. Under your leadership, jobs have been lost, the number of people with adequate health insurance has gone down, the Leave No Child Behind Act has been underfunded, and plans have been made to privatize social security. President Bush, with no jobs, or health care, or schools, or money, how exactly do you expect any families (even your 'ideal' ones) to survive? More than a million children under age eighteen already live with one or more lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender parent. Not only do these youth and their families deserve the same protections as any other family, all families deserve more protections and support than they currently receive. Yet, instead of addressing these important issues and taking strides to honor and enrich families in all their diversity, your secretary of education is worried about maple-syrup-producing cartoon lesbians, and you are spending time and political capital ensuring that LGBT people cannot marry each other or adopt the more than half a million children who are currently entangled in the foster care system. All of this time and effort is being undertaken to promote and 'protect' an ideal that is only one of many positive models for what a family can be! It is our sincere hope that you will choose to address the real issues that are hindering families tonight, that you will stop wasting everyone's time with rhetoric about family values and instead lay out a path of concrete action that will value all families. The challenges that we currently face will not be resolved by politically motivated homophobic attacks, or by scape-goating families that are supposedly less than ideal. It is the less-than-ideal families that are the cornerstone of the nation you claim to love and serve. We need your leadership now, not your verbal attacks and unsupportive policies. On behalf of youth and adults with LGBT parents everywhere, we sincerely invite you to join us in the work of protecting all families - not from homosexuality, but from poverty, violence, and war. When you begin this work in earnest, and only then, will you be truly addressing the state of the union. Thank you, Beth Teper, Executive Director |
||
 |