Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Family Values
What if every time the state legislature was in session, your right to raise children was up for debate, and bills that might take your kids away were getting closer and closer to the governor’s desk? This is what it’s like to be one of the 84,000 gay parents in Texas.
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The specific issue of gay parenting hit the Legislature’s radar screen in 1997, when a CPS supervisor named Rebecca Bledsoe abruptly removed an infant from the home of a lesbian foster couple in Dallas. The parents had not violated any of the agency’s policies, but Bledsoe removed the child anyway, citing the “open and notorious criminal sexual conduct” present in the home. Gay sex was, in fact, illegal in Texas at the time, but the law was seldom enforced. In any case, sexual orientation is not among the criteria that the state considers when someone applies to be a foster parent. It came as no surprise, then, when Bledsoe’s superiors at CPS demoted her for failing to follow proper procedure in removing the child. Bledsoe in turn sued the agency, demanding her job back and a statewide injunction against placing children in gay households.
As a cause of action, the lawsuit was thin soup. As political theater, the Rebecca Bledsoe show could not have opened at a better time. Texas, like the rest of the nation, was just beginning to tackle the gay marriage issue, and opposition to homosexuality was rapidly becoming a central organizing principle for politically active Christian conservatives. Into this debate came Bledsoe’s incendiary portrait of a Dallas CPS office infiltrated by a cabal of lesbians bent on placing the state’s most vulnerable kids in gay households. Bills to ban gay foster parenting and adoption (in addition to gay marriage) were filed in the next legislative session, and Governor Bush came out in favor of all of them, making gay parenting a front-page issue in Texas.
Bledsoe’s attorney in the lawsuit was a disciple of Richard Ford’s named Kelly Shackelford, who heads the Free Market Foundation, in Plano. Just a twenty-minute drive from Oak Lawn, it has emerged as a headquarters of sorts for the gay rights opposition in Texas. The name of the foundation, which occupies a suite in a modest two-story office building filled with realtors and law offices, is mostly a vestige of an earlier mission. Under Shackelford, a Baylor University law graduate in his mid-forties, the foundation and its sister organization, the Liberty Legal Institute, have made a much bigger splash in the realm of social and religious freedom issues than they ever did in business regulation and taxation.
Shackelford is a prodigious giver of media interviews and often submits amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court. A painting behind his desk pictures him arguing before the high court. Though he is an affable man with a genuine love of reasoned debate, Shackelford does have a flair for the dramatic: When the Supreme Court took up the issue of so-called partial-birth abortion last fall, he submitted a brief on behalf of a boy who he said had survived the procedure. “They set him aside to die,” Shackelford told me, “but after three days, they realized, ‘Hey, I guess we’ll have to do something with this kid.’ ”
In 2005, with money from conservative heavyweights James Leininger and Bob Perry, Shackelford helped organize the Texans for Marriage political action committee to support Chisum’s constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. I asked Shackelford to respond to what amounts to a sort of free-market take on the gay parenting debate, one that his own intern volunteered to me while I waited in the lobby for our interview: Why should the government favor one type of child rearing over another, subsidizing straight parents but not gay parents?
“You’re talking about experimenting with something,” Shackelford replied. “And the guinea pigs are kids.” In any case, he continued, child rearing is not the only societal benefit of heterosexual marriage. Longevity increases for both men and women when they are married, and rates of child and partner abuse go down. (Of course, these benefits may also accrue to men and women in gay relationships; the data is too sparse to say one way or another.) “Society is not trying to point to every specific individual situation, however anomalous it is,” Shackelford said. “It’s trying to encourage the one relationship that naturally produces these things. And when you start changing it, there really is no reasoned distinction for stopping at where the homosexual activists want to stop. All of the arguments they make would be totally consistent with polygamy as well.”
It’s not just the end that Shackelford objects to, it’s also the means by which gay activists are trying to achieve it—through the courts rather than in state legislatures. Advocates for gay marriage have relied on successful test cases, first in Hawaii, then in Massachusetts and, most recently, in New Jersey, where they have persuaded judges to change state law from the bench. Opposition to these “activist judges” has become something of a mantra in conservative circles in recent years. “It takes an incredible level of arrogance and elitism to think that they found the new truth and that they’re gonna force it on people,” Shackelford said. Of course, looking for a test case to change public policy is not an uncommon strategy; at this very moment, conservatives are searching for just the right case to overturn Roe v. Wade. But when judges seem to be ahead of the people, as the results of some two dozen referenda on gay marriage certainly seem to suggest, the “judicial tyranny” argument starts to gain traction. Conservative activists have parlayed that traction into support for their holy grail, an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage, which would obviate any future court challenges by gay activists on any grounds. Powerful social conservatives, like James Dobson, of Focus on the Family (with whom the Free Market Foundation is affiliated), have made a federal amendment their number one priority. Although President Bush paid lip service to the idea during his 2004 reelection bid, the amendment campaign never really got off the ground in Washington; with the Democratic takeover of Congress, it is now dead in the water.
As our interview came to a close, I asked Shackelford about a television spot that Texans for Marriage ran in several major markets in the final week of the campaign to amend the Texas constitution. He said I could probably still find it on the PAC’s Web site if I wanted to watch it. Then, beaming at the memory of the successful campaign, he suddenly swiveled his chair around and brought up the site on his computer. The video showed a male and female hand reaching out for each other against a black background as a piano played and a solemn voice-over read a passage from Genesis: “For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother, and be united with his wife, and they will become one flesh, for God’s design.” The final shot showed the two hands united, along with the hand of a baby, under the words “For God’s Design.” After it was over, I observed that God’s will was not something that had come up in our interview. Shackelford seemed slightly sheepish. “Well,” he said, “that one line out of Genesis kind of speaks for itself.”
THE UNDERLYING SENTIMENT of the Texans for Marriage spot—that homosexuality is an abomination before God—is at the core of much of the debate over gay issues in Texas, though it is not always so elegantly expressed. One of the videos shown at the Family Pride conference in Oak Lawn paused on a still photograph of two little girls locked arm in arm, one smiling at the camera and the other looking perplexed. Their identical oversized T-shirts read “God Hates Fags.” The last-minute defeat of Robert Talton’s gay foster parenting ban in 2005 prompted him to write an angry letter, laden with biblical references, to a fellow Republican legislator who had failed to support his cause. (Talton, a hot-tempered ex-cop who once posted the Capitol police at his door to keep lobbyists for gay causes away, frequently refuses to grant interviews for stories about gay issues, including this one.) A black pastor named Howard Caver, who helped found a coalition of black ministers called Not on My Watch that organized support for the 2005 gay marriage referendum, told me he saw gay marriage as a sign of a country in decline. “If God does what he usually does, he’ll have some weak nation take us over,” he said. “Will it be Iran? North Korea? I don’t know.”
The sincerity of such sentiments notwithstanding, you don’t have to be a cynic to see the strategic value of gay issues for conservative political strategists. “From the Republican point of view, it has always been the perfect wedge,” said Randall Ellis, who has lobbied for gay interests at the state capitol for years. Public debate on any gay issue unites the Republican base while slicing up the Democratic caucus like an apple pie, splitting rural constituencies from urban and minority from white. Few understood this earlier or better than Karl Rove, who was widely considered the guru of gay baiting during his years as the top political consultant in Texas. As Wayne Slater and James Moore report in their book The Architect, Rove’s most notorious project was a 1994 whisper campaign against Governor Ann Richards, whose unmarried status and supposed predilection for gay and lesbian political appointments, it was suggested, meant she might have been gay herself. The smear included a salacious last-minute flyer—unsigned, of course, by the Bush campaign—picturing two shirtless men, one black and one white, kissing each other over a tagline that read “This is what Ann Richards wants to teach your children in public schools.”
Rove is still at it. According to Slater and Moore, Rove was the man in the White House who recognized long before anyone else the importance of gay marriage for the 2004 elections. Constitutional amendments banning gay marriage were on the ballot in eleven states in 2004, and they were widely credited with providing the increased evangelical turnout Bush needed to defeat John Kerry, particularly in the key swing state of Ohio. Rove made sure that the Republican National Committee got behind the Ohio ballot measure when the time was right.
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