An initiative that would prohibit individuals cohabiting outside of marriage from adopting or serving as foster parents has qualified for the Arkansas ballot this November. More from Jurist here.
A bit of background: In 1999, the Arkansas Child Welfare Agency Review Board promulgated a regulation prohibiting an individual from serving as a foster parent “if any adult member of that person’s household is a homosexual.” The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down this regulation in 2006. In 2007, the Arkansas legislature tried (and failed) to pass legislation that would have imposed a ban on lesbian and gay foster parenting and adoption. This initiative is yet another attempt to re-implement this ban, albeit in a facially neutral manner—because it nominally applies to unmarried same-sex and different-sex couples equally (though, in reality, only different-sex couples can marry Arkansas and escape the ban).
-Tony Infanti
Anything you can suggest that readers of this blog can do to try to defeat this?
Our readers could visit the web site for Arkansas Families First (http://arkansasfamiliesfirst.org/), which is a coalition of organizations aligned against this measure, and support AFF (and/or its constituent organizations) in the fight against the ballot measure.