Act No. 1 Limits Children's Chances to Find a Home

Staff Writer

  All children deserve a few basic necessities in life, like food and clothing. They also need unconditional love, care and a place to call home.

   In Arkansas alone, approximately 3,700 children make up the foster care system. Arkansas currently has 1,190 certified foster homes.

   On the November ballot, Arkansas voters will get the chance to vote for or against Proposed Initiative Act No.1 (Proposed by Petition of the People). The popular name of the act states:  "An act providing that an individual who is cohabiting outside of a valid marriage may not adopt or be a foster parent of a child less than eighteen years old."

   I will vote against the proposed act. I do not personally believe in living outside the bonds of marriage or cohabiting sexually with someone.

   Even in a married couple’s life, the relationships are not always perfect or even ideal, and sometimes even children in those relationships suffer.

   With the same-sex or opposite-sex couples living outside the bonds of marriage, their relationships might not be ideal in the eyes of the social worker, but it does not mean they cannot foster or adopt children, unless the act passes. I believe they would still make great parents to one or more of those 3,700 children in the foster care system.

   Will the situation for the child improve if they go to a home were the couples live outside the bounds of marriage? I would say "yes!"  Now, the child gets someone in his or her life who love them and get a place to call home.

   In my eyes right now, there are too many children in the system who do not get to call a place home or even get someone to care, love and support them. The reality of that makes me sad. 

   I think it should go on a case-by-case basis of those wishing to adopt or foster children.  If a couple, married or not married, chooses to adopt or foster children, then why not allow them to? Why turn down someone who wants to help?

   This week I thumbed through some pictures of children up for adoption on the Department of Human Services Web site for Arkansas. Their profiles told about their personality, birth date, name and if they had siblings and if their siblings were adopted.  All the profiles had one thing in common: they want a family.

   I think in today’s world there are many types of families - the single-parent families, the married-parent families and those aunts and uncles and grandparents that make up families. A family according to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, “consists of one or two parents and their children.”

   I believe a famly is where heart and home are at.

   Why limit those that want to be adoptive or foster parents, when already there’s a shortage of them in the state?

Have a comment? Please e-mail us.

©The Voice 2008