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I really wonder how my state is going to handle it since they passed a ban in November on "cohabitation" adults/unmarried couples fostering or adopting children. This applies both to private and public adoptions.
Tennessee is also considering such a ban. Out & About - Tennessee News: Tennessee seeks to ban gay adoptions
With the coming increase of kids in foster care, it seems bans like this are pretty cruel and stupid.
Agreed. Why do people who are so uptight about "family values being only a hetero-married couple" ignore the real comparison which is a loving home versus a foster home?
It's obvious they don't care about the kids, they just care about controlling others' lives like a neighborhood ordinance banning all xmas lights except white ones. They care more about the reputation of their society than the reality of foster homes.
Ridiculous, imo. If the goal were to find permanant loving homes for children then the marital status of said couples should not be a factor, nor should the sexuality of the potential parents.
Yet again children in foster care are getting shafted to prove a political point. Back in the 1970-1980s the black social workers union imposed a ban on black children being adopted into white homes. Certainly their original point was on the money --- a black home would be best, but their rules went to the extreme. How many children never were adopted because of it? And now these kids -- how many will never be adopted because the adoptive parent pool will get even smaller?
How these so called experts sleep at night is a mystery to me.
"It's obvious they don't care about the kids, they just care about controlling others' lives"
I couldn't agree with you more. We used to be foster parents for Tennessee. We gave and gave, and got nothing back from DCS but a headache and a heartache. The only good thing that came out of fostering was getting to know some really good kids, and being their parents for a little while. We wanted to adopt, but DCS screwed up our react form (that's the database that matches adoptable children with families). We wanted to adopt 3-12 year old, either girl or boy, and DCS put in there that we wanted to adopt a 2-3 year old. It took us over a year to find out that they screwed it up. Personally, I think that it was done on purpose because we were one of only two foster homes in our area at the time, and I think that it was done to keep a foster home.
Just a few months after it was corrected (and we had to request it in writing to be changed), I made a mistake by contacting another foster parent via email. She told me things that I knew was wrong for her to tell me, and she told me things that made it obvious that she was mentally and verbally abusing a teen in her care. I turned her in, and DCS said that because I sought her out and emailed her that I too had breached that policy. I didn't know that you couldn't contact another foster parent via online communications, I did know that you don't tell another foster parent medical and very private information about a teen in your care, I did know that you don't call a teen lazy, and good for nothing, and I know enough to know that you don't tell a child that their family doesn't love them or want them. I know enough that you don't post pictures of your foster children online. But I didn't know that even if you don't mention details and someone else does you are responsible for the communication also. We had training on policies all of about 10 minutes in PATH. Personally, I think that if something is important enough to close your home, it should be important enough to have a training module on. If I'd know better, I'd have done better, and I certainly wouldn't willfully breach a policy and then go and turn myself in. We begged and pleaded to get another chance, we offered to take PATH over, to take special classes, we asked to be able to foster long enough to just adopt, we were told "no". We have spent the last year trying to get our home opened back up, we tried to go with Youth Villages, only to find out that DCS has complete control over who fosters and who does not. If you are blacklisted in DCS' records, you can't foster for any agency in this state, and you have to be a foster parent to adopt (even from out of state). We are just now looking into adopting privately -- but believe it or not, we don't want a baby, we are too old to have a baby, we want to adopt an older child and a teen. We added two extra bedrooms and an extra bathroom onto our home, so we'd have 3 extra bedrooms to give children. Here we sit, now knowing what it's like to have children in our home and our lives, what it's like to be parents, and having that taken away from us. In our 40s, we are losing hope of ever having a family of our own, and DCS took 4 precious years of our lives away that we could have used to seek adoption elsewhere. We are good and decent, no record, own our own house, and have more than enough love and happiness to share with a child. With 15 years of marriage, I think we've more than proved our ability to committ, and yet all we've found from DCS has been unforgiveness, judgementalness, rigidity, inability to sympathize, and intolerance, none of which anyone who deals with and decides on the fate of children need to have... I feel sorry for all the children the Tennessee Department of Children's Services have decided that we aren't good enough to be parents to. We'd move, but we can't sell our house in this market. I wish we'd stayed in Kentucky.
You'd think that they'd work with foster parents like they do biological parents, if TN indeed cares about keeping foster homes available for kids.
So, you can see how I'd agree with you.
I really wonder how my state is going to handle it since they passed a ban in November on "cohabitation" adults/unmarried couples fostering or adopting children. This applies both to private and public adoptions.
Tennessee is also considering such a ban. Out & About - Tennessee News: Tennessee seeks to ban gay adoptions
With the coming increase of kids in foster care, it seems bans like this are pretty cruel and stupid.
I agree, my spouse and I lived together for 25 YEARS before we got hitched...that's a LOT longer than a lot of marriages!And we were NOT better people just because we did get married...we were just the same two people with a strong relationship.
How foolish to punish children by not giving them a home because of some "moral authority" !!
They are not a moral authority. God truly has no place in Tennessee DCS. When you foster, you are told that you have to respect the religious customs of others, and also those who aren't religious. I've known several people who had to leave their Christianity at the door when they went to work for DCS, so it makes me so angry that it thinks that it (for we are talking about a system, not people)... it being DCS, thinks that it can pull out the Christianity card to get what it wants.
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