An Open Letter to Mike Huckabee.

Dear Mister Huckabee,

What a pleasure it was to come home this afternoon and find your recent comments on children of same-sex parents on my Google News-Feed. Oh, it troubled me for a moment, but it's given me a reason to blog again, and to address an issue that so often comes up for children with same-sex parents and their families. The judgement of our families from people who have no experience on the inside of them...

I guess it should be no surprise to me that you would call us "science experiments", but you should know that we are more often called "social experiments". There is very little science involved in the process of adoption. Where science comes into play is within the heterosexual relationship, rather. Isn't the mixing of body fluid and therefore genes more accurately a science experiment than the rigorous and sometimes enduring application process, the checks-and-balances, that a same-sex couple (or a hetero couple) must go through in order to adopt a child? Besides, get on the bandwagon Huckabee, your friends like to call us "social experiments"...

It also appears that you haven't done your research. I'll pay no mind to your opinion that totally ignores the multitude of research that has emerged from the sampling and study of children with same-sex parents. Resoundingly it's been proven that children with same-sex families are no better or worse adjusted than children with heterosexual parents. The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry finds us no more likely to be gay, to be sexually abused, to have issues with gender identity, or to have demonstrated any different gender role behavior than children reared in traditional households (AACAP, 2006).

Look Huckabee, same-sex parents are not going to stop finding ways to fulfill their dreams of creating families. There are already many children of same-sex families in our world and there will be many more. At this time, approximately "96 percent of all U.S. counties have at least one same-sex couple with children under 18 in the household" according to the 2003 Census. "Yet only seven states and the District of Columbia have laws supportive of gay and lesbian couple adoption"(Urban Institute, 2003). So, I guess what I am trying to tell you is that you're not going to stop the already burgeoning same-sex headed family by denouncing them as "science experiments", so why don't you instead try to protect all children, instead of just children with heterosexual parents, adopted or otherwise?

Furthermore, children of same-sex families more often site judgements on their families from their external worlds as more troublesome than their experience than living within their families. That's right Huckabee, be proud that you are participating in a form of bullying, that you are contributing to rhetoric that is more damaging to children than the mere experiences of growing up in a home with same-sex parents. You are also contributing to the notion that no home is better than a home with two adults who are actively seeking to provide a home to a child who is in a system where there are more children awaiting adoption, than parents who are seeking to adopt.

This is the worst part, by denouncing our families, by making public your opinion of the parents of some children, you are not only shaming our home life, you are making us acutely aware that we are not accepted, that our families are not protected, and that not only are children bullied by children, but that children can also be bullied by adults, by institutionalized prejudice. It's a horrible feeling to be a teenager or a child in a world where people like yourself insist on continually marginalizing our families. For a child to make sense of this institutionalized hate is confusing, particularly when we find our homes, and our communities, safe and comfortable, and we find the external world cold and prejudiced.

Also, to denounce our families publicly is to also say that we are not recognized as families, that we do not face the same kind of problems that traditional families face. It sends the message to us that it is not safe to ask our communities, our governments, the institutions in place to protect every tax-paying citizen in the United States, to help us if we are facing problems. Problems such as mental illness or domestic violence or poverty. That if we ask for help with these familial situations that we will not only be scorned for asking, but that our families will be scrutinized as problematic, instead of the problem itself. This institutionalized double-closeting is yet another situation that arrises from your abhorrent public behavior.

What is the best part about what you had to say today? You are actively inspiring more children to stand up for their families and to be counted, and to be visible in the debate for equal rights. I am one of those children who came out of the 80s and 90s fiercely intent on joining the cause for equality. So, today, I guess I should be thanking you, for inspiring more of us to come out, to be counted, and to demonstrate that our families will exist with or without your approval, and that we will continue to fight for our parents and ourselves until we are protected by the laws of our cities, counties, states, and nations in which we reside.

So, thanks Huckabee.
I guess.

Sincerely,
Chelsia A. Rice

Games with Death

There are wicked games the living play when death is making it's long stride into our worlds, especially if there is time to consider it's arrival. We play with our positioning: How close do we want or need to be? How will our closeness or lack of presence affect the rest of the living? When do we arrive and say our goodbyes, and will death beat us to the bedside? Do we position ourself to see the decline, to witness death diminish the one(s) we love? And we ask ourselves the questions: Would we rather have death come swiftly, sweep through and pickup the living in it's talons, carry it away? Or does the time left with the dying bring more peace and resolution?

I once had a Scientologist roommate who was reading through one of R.L. Hubbard's massive mahogany leather bound books. That book sat at her bedside and I feared, though was curious, about it's contents. So, one day while she was away I snuck into her room, grabbed the book and took it to my room. I opened the book to the middle and started reading. Hubbard was saying that pain is experienced because actions are too swift. He gave the example of a bullet piercing a body. He said, if the bullet were to be slowly pressed into the body over a long period of time that there wouldn't be pain. I thought about it, even agreed with it, and suddenly felt I was being sucked into Hubbard's prose and brainwashed, so I closed the book and returned it to her bedside, but I've never forgot his philosophy on pain.

I've been avoiding (I am prone to avoidance) the pain that I knew would come from writing about the death of my dear friend, Stephanie, who has fourth-stage squeamish cell carcinoma, cervical cancer which has spread throughout her body to her organs and her lymph nodes. In November, a few short weeks after she was diagnosed, her PET scans revealed that the cancer had fused the lymph nodes around her spine in a large mass that spanned her lower lumbar to the middle of her shoulders. It was when I knew that Stephanie's time would come quickly. It wasn't her doctor's optimistic one-year prognosis that solidified my knowing; in the past two years I've seen two of my people die after the cancer was found near, in, and around their spine. I'm no fool. I knew we didn't have anything close to a year to share our precious time with Stephanie. A few days ago, Stephanie was transferred into hospice care.

So here I am, tweaking cheap-flight websites, trying to make reservations, trying to find the least expensive way to be with and comfort my dying friend, to commune in comfort with her family, and her chosen family, and I'm frustrated and angry that this positioning, this financial game, these questions and obstacles and considerations or even an issue when someone's life whom I care so much about may be gone in an instant. It's a frustrating and ridiculous.

And although all of this emotion of this positioning is so overwhelming that I find myself jolted awake in the middle of the night thinking her time has just come and gone, and pacing in the kitchen with my coffee in the early morning hours wondering how and when I will visit, I am at peace with Stephanie's impending passing. I am at peace with the arrival of death when it eventually comes. It's the time between knowing it will come and it's actual arrival that makes crazy. I've seen it unfurl in in my own family. How they bowed forward in their chairs, and hunched towards the bed with the mouths turned down. And nobody has enough alone time, no one feels they have had their final say, everybody wants for something more. Motivations all seem so suspect.

Whose need is the most genuine, the most important? How do we determine these things as we look upon this intimate process? Whose needs do we put first when there are so many who want to be and are a part of the process, who are dazed by all that needs to be resolved in such little time? I try to leave my own needs out of this scenario, though I am not foolish enough to believe that I also don't have my motivations. Yes, my visit is partially about me and my relationship with Steph, but I also want to be there to lay hands on, and comfort the ones whose pain is more severe than my own. The community of people around Stephanie who love her as much as I do.

I'm coming to you soon, Ms. Stephanie. And although you may not have the appetite, I will be bringing with me your favorite caramels.
With love and with peace in your process.

With love and peace for the many people who love you so much.