Happy Harvey Milk Day

One way I am commemorating the day is by writing my Senator, Dianne Feinstein, to urge her to help get ENDA passed and DADT repealed. I thought Sen. Feinstein was a particularly apt choice, because she worked with Milk and famously announced that he and Mayor George Moscone had been shot and killed. If you want to write her, here is a link to her contact page .

I also found some national news coverage from 1978 about the murders and Feinstein's announcement about Milk and Moscone's deaths. Unfortunately, the report is cut off at the end, but the first five minutes are worth watching. There is a note of ambivalence about Harvey in the coverage. The reporter had this to say about him:

A homosexual elected not in spite of it, but because of it, in a district that is largely homosexual ... As a member of the Board of Supervisors, Harvey Milk championed homosexual rights

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More on Rekers

St. Petersburg Times:

For the princely sum of $120,000, Rekers' job was to convince the court that homosexuals like Gill are unfit parents and should be categorically denied the ability to adopt children. He failed. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman completely discounted Rekers' testimony as not "credible" and "motivated by his strong ideological and theological convictions." In a groundbreaking decision, Lederman threw out the then-31-year ban on gay adoption as unconstitutional. Her ruling is on appeal.

So what exactly did Florida buy for all that money? In 250 pages of court transcripts, Rekers essentially made one argument over and over. His thesis was that gays (including lesbians) are disproportionately prone to conditions that would "adversely affect the home environment." The list of woes he cited included depression, suicide attempts, multiple sexual partners, relationship breakups, substance abuse and domestic violence.

From this Rekers concluded that a blanket ban on gay adoption is warranted — even if potential adoptive gay parents are well screened for these conditions — since social workers cannot predict which gay parents might succumb to these problems in the future.

This was a thin reed upon which to build an argument, particularly in light of the American Psychological Association's stance that the sexual orientation of parents has no bearing on the "adjustment, development and psychological well-being of children."

There is one more bit of tragic irony. Rekers is a father of six children, one of them a boy he adopted from foster care — just like Gill wanted to do. I wonder whether Rekers thinks people who hire same-sex prostitutes for sexual favors should be allowed to adopt children. Maybe McCollum should pay him more of our money to find out.

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