Homosexual Couples Battle for Right to Raise Children

The black-and-white photograph of two adults and a grade-school-age girl, all neatly attired and beaming broadly for the camera, brightens the newsletter’s front page.

The caption reads, “We are family,” but the family is clearly not the traditional kind--it is headed by a lesbian couple who early this year took the rare step of jointly adopting a girl as their daughter.

Their family portrait appeared in a newsletter of the San Francisco-based Lesbian Rights Project, which gave legal help to the women as they wound their way through a maze of social workers and legal requirements of adoption.

Lawyers say joint adoption of a child by an openly lesbian couple has occurred only twice in the United States.

Both took place this year in two of Northern California’s most liberal counties, and they represent another step by homosexuals to win the full legal rights of parenthood.

Homosexuals have suffered two setbacks in their fight for civil rights. The first stemmed from the disease AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), which some think has slowed the gay freedom movement; a more recent setback was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states can outlaw sodomy.

Despite these setbacks, homosexual men and women remain insistent on their right to be parents.

Roberta Achtenberg, the Lesbian Rights Project’s directing attorney, said she considered the Supreme Court decision in June a setback for homosexuals seeking the rights of parenthood because it would reinforce anti-homosexual attitudes already held by some judges and social workers.

“I expect awesome repercussions in child custody cases because of this decision,” she said in an interview.

She said the ruling gives some “official sanction” to sodomy as a criminal act, which will become a factor when lower court judges make their decisions.

Homosexual rights groups estimate the United States has between 3 million and 5 million homosexual parents, although some social scientists think the number may be closer to 1.5 million.

Lawyers say that most cases in which homosexual men and women seek custody of their children are settled out of court, which tends to keep the issue out of the public eye.

But this is not always the case. When a judge a few weeks ago awarded a homosexual man in Palm Springs, Calif., custody of his teen-age son after a four-year court battle with his ex-wife, the news made headlines across the country.

The father, Frank Batey, 42, said in a local newspaper interview that he hopes the case will encourage other parents, “both gay and straight,” to stand up for their rights and their children’s rights in court. The woman, Betty Lou Batey, a fundamentalist Christian, had argued that his homosexuality would adversely influence their son.

Much more often, however, custody battles are settled through state mediation officials and in family courts, which are closed to the press.

John Greenleaf, a lawyer and a homosexual father himself, says he has handled about 10 such custody battles in the two years he has been in Hollywood; all were settled out of court.

Many men drop out of the fight before their case can reach the litigation stage. “It either doesn’t get to trial because fathers either back down or for some reason don’t want the issue to be publicized,” he said.

The ranks of homosexual parents include those who discovered after bearing children that they were homosexual, as well as men and women who decided after “coming out” of the closet that they wanted to adopt children or to bear children through such means as artificial insemination.

Homosexuals seeking to adopt children or to gain custody of their own offspring fare unevenly throughout the country and even within individual states.

In some states, particularly in the South where anti-sodomy laws are still on the books and in conservative areas like California’s politically and socially conservative Orange County, it is rare or impossible for homosexual parents to get custody of their children, Achtenberg said.

The Lesbian Rights Project emphasizes the need to educate social workers and judges to overcome the stereotypes of homosexuals used in the past to deprive them of child custody.

Achtenberg points to numerous court cases in which stereotypes have been used against homosexual parents. For instance, the Virginia Supreme Court last year ruled against a homosexual father and gave custody of his daughter to the mother after noting the mother reported the girl had seen him “hugging and kissing and sleeping” with his male lover.

“The father’s continuous exposure of the child to his immoral and illicit relationship renders him an unfit and improper custodian as a matter of law,” the court said.

Achtenberg cites many psychological studies that dispute notions that homosexual parents influence children to become homosexuals or that children will be stigmatized by society because they have homosexual parents.

“I’m not saying gay parents have a monopoly on good parenting,” she said. “Not all should get custody of children. Not all are good parents.”

But those who are responsible adults should have as much right to be parents as heterosexual couples and “straight” single parents, she argued.

The Lesbian Rights Project, a nonprofit public-interest group, was founded nine years ago to help lesbians retain custody of their children and is considered the country’s leading organization fighting for the rights of homosexual parents.