By John Brummett

There’s a 39-year-old woman living in Tulsa, Okla., a registered nurse, who lives jointly in a same-sex relationship with another registered nurse, who is 38. Together they provide a home for the other woman’s four-year-old daughter.

This 39-year-old woman has an infant grandchild in Northwest Arkansas who has been taken from the parents by the state. That happened after the baby was brought to a hospital with multiple injuries indicating physical abuse.

As the closest relative, this Tulsa woman is seeking to step responsibly and lovingly into the breach to take custody of her own needy grandchild.

But it turns out that the people of Arkansas, either because they didn’t know what they were doing or because they hate or fear gay people, or all of that, approved overwhelmingly in November that little gem called Initiated Act 1.

It said that no couple living together outside wedlock could be adoptive or foster parents.

The point, at least with the religious right-wingers advancing the initiative, was to “blunt the homosexual agenda,” as one of them bluntly said. They threw shacked-up heterosexuals into the ban only to try to avoid a lawsuit accusing them of failing to attend to our powerful constitutional principle of equal protection under the law.

So it turns out that they failed on avoiding a lawsuit.

One was filed in Pulaski County on Tuesday. It cited 20 aggrieved plaintiffs, the first of whom was the 39-year-old woman in Tulsa. Another intriguing set of plaintiffs is a homosexual couple that has one state-approved adopted child already, but now, all of a sudden, can’t qualify for a second through no fault of its own or any difference in behavior or situation.

There’s some unequal protection for you.

The Tulsa grandma is saying that the government of Arkansas is arbitrarily and capriciously denying her equal protection under the law by saying she can’t take custody of her own flesh-and-blood grandchild when, as it turns out, she would not be so denied if she kept a separate household from her same-sex partner.

That’s the most glaring silliness of this silly law. You can’t regulate sex. It’s private, and, anyway, who wants to watch? Well, you know what I mean. We can’t keep a lookout in everyone’s bedroom. There aren’t enough willing voyeurs. That’s my point.

So this law presumes to deny rights to cohabitants when those rights are not denied to people who live apart, even if they are doing the same intimate physical entanglements, though with officially separate addresses.

Another glaring silliness — no, this is a travesty and outrage — is that a state government, upon command of its voters, would take a child from the parents for the child’s own good, then turn around and deny placement of that child with its next-nearest and wholly responsible kin.

It may even turn out that this very state government, by taking untold numbers of willing foster and adoptive parents out of the pool of eligible households, will end up having to provide some sort of anachronistic institutional home for this child and countless others.

And, again, to make sure you are clear on this: This state government would do this not because grandma was a lesbian, but because grandma had a permanent same-sex partner whom she loved and with whom she lived and with whom she was raising another young child.

It would be a better home for the child if grandma was sleeping around, you see. Or so the state of Arkansas seems to believe officially.

Here’s thinking this lawsuit has a chance of success. Here’s thinking the voters of Arkansas ought to take long, hard looks at themselves.
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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.