Dirty Tricks And Scary Pictures

There was a big kerfuffle down in Florida over a recent adoption case. see, it was the case of a one-year-old boy and the gay couple who are his parents. It got all the religious wingnuts in a snit. You know, gay folks and babies; indoctrination; molestation; fabulous sense of fashion; good sense of the right powertool for the right job.

In this case though, the judge ruled that the boy who had been living with his foster parents was "happy and thriving" and that a permanent adoption made perfect sense--if adoption was legal in Florida. The judge's ruling seemed like another step toward that goal; one day the two foster foster mommies might become the adoptive mommies of the little boy.

But the wingnuts, who don't have anything to do with the child, who never saw the foster parents with the child, want the boy removed from the home because his parents are lesbians. They, Orlando's Florida Family Policy Council, called the judges ruling "arrogant judicial activism" in an alert sent out to its members last week. Oh, and they didn't just call the gay couple names and rant and rave the usual anti-gay propaganda. No, they included the picture of the adoptive parents [see above] in their literature.

That photograph of a strange, androgynous-looking duo was so bizarre that it was almost impossible to tell if the couple was male or female. And it lead some to people to wonder how a judge could ever place a young child with such strange parents.

Except the judge didn't.

The abnormal-looking couple that the Policy Council chose to illustrate this story is not the same couple granted the right to adopt the child. The foster parents are Vanessa Alenier and her partner, Melanie Leon, and they are pictured to the right.

The picture that the Policy Council chose was a grotesque caricature, a scare tactic of horrible looking women who, of course, who molest a young boy, mistreat a young boy, harm a young boy. This is how groups like the Florida Family Policy Council see gay couples; as monsters. As it's how they want the world to see us, too. It's how they'll work to keep us from marriage equality or adoption rights, from getting fired for being gay, losing our homes for being gay.

How do you fight people who paint you as a monster?

You come out; you show who you really are, and you call out people like the Florida Family Policy Council for they dirty dealing.