They Took Brent Because We Were Gay
The Trump administration fights for this
LGBTQ families are bracing for impact right now —
Allison Rushing, a religious extremist and former member of an anti-LGBTQ hate group, has just been confirmed to a lifetime appointment as a powerful federal appellate judge.
She was confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit by the Senate earlier this week on a 53–44 party-line vote, with all present Democrats voting against her, and all present Republicans voting for her.
Only 37, Rushing is now the youngest federal judge in the country, and also one of the most dangerous. Before being confirmed, she worked for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian activist group classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Rushing is on the record arguing in favor of extreme religious privilege, for Christians to have the legal right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and even to criminalize them. Despite her denunciation of the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision in United States v. Windsor, and her commitment to ADF’s mission to recriminalize homosexuality and sterilize transgender people, all 53 Republican Senators voted to confirm her.
When people talk about culture wars, this is what they mean. This woman insists her religion ought to be imposed on the nation as a whole. She argues against LGBTQ people being legally allowed to live freely, to marry, to have sex, or to raise children.
You can call it war, but I call it life. Can I tell you a story about real life, about real human suffering, about a real child Rushing would have denied a family?
This is what her appointment means —
I woke up to rats chewing on my intestines. Making breakfast for Brent in that condition wasn’t easy. French toast and bacon smells terrible when you’re agonizing over losing somebody you love. He ate a few bites, soft eyes more fixed on me than on his food.
“Not hungry, buddy?”
He sighed and pushed his plate away. “Let’s not do this, OK? Let’s get in the car and drive to the cabin in Maine and never come back. Huh? Can we?”
“Hey, it’s gonna be all right. We’ll just ask Gloria to extend our temporary custody. You’re 14 years old. What you want has to count for something.”
“Oh, yeah? Then how come we have to go to the office instead of her coming here? When kids go there, they don’t come back. I know. I seen it too many times.”
Those rats started chewing even harder. “Can you put on your new white shirt and tie for me, man? Let’s show her what a good looking kid you are. Let’s knock her socks off, OK?”
“Let’s just drive to Maine and stay with Steve and Don. Please?”
All I could do was shake my head and pretend to be optimistic.
He pushed back from the table and headed for his room. “I better bring comfortable clothes with me. Just in case.”
My heart hurt to know how practical the boy had become, even as young as he was. He was facing up to reality better than I was managing.
We didn’t take the car. We hopped on the subway and rattled off toward the child welfare offices where Brent’s caseworker was expecting us as her first appointment of the morning.
I thought back to the night a few months before when it had all started. A blizzard was raging outside as my partner and I were slipping into bed to kindle a little anti-winter fire. His arms wrapped around me, and he’d just begun to nuzzle the nape of my neck with the tip of his nose when the phone startled us out from under the blankets.
“Hello?” I mumbled into the mouthpiece.
The caribbean cadences of Gloria’s grandmotherly voice greeted me for the first time. An emergency, she explained. Brent, a boy whose family we knew, was in danger at home. He’d burned through several foster families already. She needed temporary shelter for him. Could we take him? The parents already agreed. Just for a few nights until she found some option other than juvenile detention?
A few nights turned into a few weeks, then a few months.
Brent shocked Gloria by settling down and thriving with us. He quit skipping school. He stopped beating up and bullying younger kids. He ran home every day full of stories and smiles. I started teaching him how to cook. My partner taught him how to throw down rad dance moves and even “radder” tricks on a skateboard. He brought a stray kitten home. We adopted her too.
Only we hadn’t really adopted Brent.
Gloria made us an appointment at the private agency that started handling his case after he came to live with us. “They need to sign off,” she explained. “He’s on their caseload now, so they need to approve a permanent fostering arrangement or maybe an adoption. I can’t just keep telling them the boy’s staying with family friends.”
My partner and I had walked into their office wondering if they’d make us choose between fostering and adoption. That’s not what happened.
“Can I ask about your living arrangements?” the director wanted to know. She squinted at us over the top of reading glasses after taking forever to leaf through the case file.
I didn’t know what she meant. “Um, we have a three bedroom on the Plateau. the whole second floor. Brent has his own room with a balcony. We rent, but you can see in the file that we’re financially solvent.”
“I see. Can I ask you what you mean exactly by “we?”
“Um, David and me. Us. We’re a couple. We’ve been together for years. Isn’t that in there?”
“By couple, can I take it you mean a gay couple?”
“Of course. Gloria and Brent and the family and all — well, everybody knows that.”
She started scribbling rapidly. “I see.”
She stood up a moment later. “Thank you for coming in. We’ll be in touch.”
“What? That’s it? Don’t you have any questions? Gloria said you’d need to arrange more home visits and so forth.”
“We’ll send you our decision in the mail, sir.”
It came three days letter. Brent brought it up with the power bill and a pizza circular.
One page. One paragraph. After opening pleasantries, this is what it said.
We regret to inform you that United Catholic Children’s Services does not certify foster or adoptive parents if they are involved in same-sex partnerships. While we appreciate and commend your desire to contribute to the community, we are unable to approve placement of the minor child in your home.
Gloria called me three days later and asked me to bring Brent to her office. She’d never done that before. She didn’t want to tell me why.
Thus, the rats in my gut.
Brent was very small for 14, but he took great care to maintain his teenage dignity. So, I was pretty shocked when he grabbed my hand after we got off the train. He clenched it tight all the way across the square and up to the revolving doors of the huge government building.
He took a deep breath before we stepped inside. “It’s not too late for Maine.” His voice cracked at the end.
My heart broke for him. If only he could understand how badly I wanted to run away too. It sucked being an adult — knowing we had no good answers and no good options.
Gloria hugged both of us tight. Her accent and a lavender head scarf set off a dress that reminded me of a month I’d once spent in Jamaica. “Come into my office, will you, please?”
We followed her.
“No, Brent. Can you wait for us out here?”
She broke the bad news fast. Without agency certification, she’s out of options. She can’t let Brent continue to live with us.
“But! They turned us down because we’re gay! They can’t do that! I don’t follow all the news or anything, but I know this state allows gay people to foster and adopt.”
“They also allow contracting agencies to opt out for religious reasons.”
“Fine. Whatever. We’ll use a different agency.”
“I tried that. My supervisor says, ‘No agency shopping.’ Brent is with United Catholic. Luck of the draw. With United Catholic he stays. Between you and me? She agrees with them. She’s not going to make an exception.”
“Oh, my God. This can’t be happening. So, what do we do now?”
She didn’t say anything for a long minute, just turned her big brown eyes on me mournfully.
“Gloria, please.”
“What you do now is say goodbye. I’m sorry. It’s easier when it’s fast. I have a group-home placement for him. The driver’s already waiting.”
Brent wouldn’t even look at me when I stepped back into the lobby. I tried to hug him when they took him away, but he jerked out of my grasp and marched off with his head down, eyes glued to the industrial tiling on the floor.
Want some good news?
That didn’t happen. The winter blizzard part of that story is true. Gloria really did call us late at night. Brent really did come to live with us. He really did thrive. We really did adopt his stray kitten.
We didn’t lose custody of him. I was certified as a foster parent, and Brent lived with us until after he finished growing up.
With our help, he overcame multiple mental-health challenges and lives a rich life that all sorts of experts told us would never be possible for him.
So, why did I fake you out and write the story with that alternative ending?
Here’s the bad news —
I wrote that ending because it’s true for lots of families. Private child services agencies all over the United States deny placement every day to children in need of homes. They deny placement for no other reason than that the prospective foster or adoptive parents are LGBTQ.
They deny placement even in states with laws that explicitly allow same-sex partners to foster and adopt.
The reasons why are complicated. By tradition, most states “farm out” child services. They award contracts, often on a county or municipal level, to private agencies that handle the day-to-day work of foster care and adoption. Also by tradition, many of these private agencies are religious.
Many states allow religious agencies to make their own rules about certifying families. Some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma, have recently passed laws that explicitly give religious agencies the right to use sexual orientation and faith affiliation to deny certification.
Seven other states already had such laws on their books. Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia.
Elsewhere, Catholic and evangelical Christian agencies are fighting in court for permission not to live up to the terms of their contracts. For example, Catholic Social Services (CSS) in Philadelphia recently sued in federal court asking a judge to set aside its contractual obligations to certify same-sex couples as foster and adoptive parents.
They had been denying certification already, in violation of the contract they’d signed agreeing to act as agents of the state. They lost the case initially, but they’re appealing.
Sadly, many more cases wait in the legal pipeline.
Many more agencies are trying to frame the issue as one of “religious freedom.” They demand the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people and in the process deny loving homes to children who need them.
More children are waiting for families than there are families to take them. Refusing to place children with same-sex parents invites an inevitable end result. Children languish in group homes and institutions.
More than 437,000 children were in foster care in 2016, and on average, a child waits nearly two years for placement, according to the HHS Administration for Children and Family.
That’s the sad reality —
What’s worse is that with more and more religious extremists like Allison Rushing being appointed to the federal bench, court challenges are less and less likely to succeed. More and more LGBTQ parents are going to be frozen out of adoption and foster care.
More and more children are going to grow up in institutions.
