Utah Judge Won't Let Loving Lesbians Get Their Gay All Over Foster Kid

Moms!

Time for another episode of "Wingnuts think they know what's best for kids, probably shouldn't be allowed anywhere near kids." This time it's a Utah judge responsible for deciding whether parents are fit to adopt kids. His name is Scott Johansen, and he's pretty sure the studies on gay parenting he's chosen to read (SPOILER: the fake ones the religious right buys with its moneys as part of the "culture war") clearly show kids do best when one of their parents has a pecker and the other one has a 'gina:

[Beckie] Peirce, 34, and her wife, 38-year-old April Hoagland, have had the 1-year-old girl in their home for three months while the state moves toward terminating her biological mother's parental rights.

"The mother has asked us to adopt," Hoagland said.

So the pair — who married in October 2014 and were licensed as foster parents earlier this year — were caught off guard Tuesday when 7th District Court Juvenile Judge Scott Johansen ordered the child removed from their care.

"He said he has research to back that children do better in heterosexual homes," Hoagland said.

Johansen did not provide specifics of that research ...

Of course he didn't. Because he might be relying on widely discredited research, or he might just be pulling particularly bigoted kernels of corn out of his poo and calling that "doing his research." You never can tell with these types.

So Beckie and April have had the child for a few months, the bio mom wants them to adopt her, and Utah state law, according to Slate, says the parents' gender doesn't matter. Oh, and, the Utah Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) and the Guardian ad Litem want the little girl adopted by these women.

The couple already has two kids, who seem to be doing fine, so it's not like these ladies met last night at the Wild West Ladies Saloon (where every night is Ladies' Night!), cruised through the Home Depot drive-thru on the way home, and decided to go ahead and pick up a foster kid.

As Beckie told the Salt  Lake Tribune , "the only thing standing in the way is the judge," who wants DCFS to find the kid a new home within the week, in order to calm his hateful, ignorant-assed nerves.

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But he has this research, you see, inside his brain! It says straight parents rule and gay parents drool, and he would show it to you if it actually existed! Actually, what he probably has is the famously discredited Mark Regnerus study on gay parenting, which has been so thoroughly debunked as agenda-driven, scientifically unsound bullshit, bought and paid for by the religious right, that it's a punchline among all real scientists who study the issue, and also lots of people who aren't scientists but HAVE A BRAIN, MORAN.

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As Slate points out, "more than 71 scholarly studies from the last 35 years" say gay and lesbian parents are JUST GREAT. Just a couple weeks ago, we gaysplained a study that found lesbian parents actually do BETTER in some areas than gross fundamentalist Christian breeder parents. And HERE is a recent study that says the kiddos often do better too.

The only way the kids fare worse, in fact, is that they deal with societal stigma from people like Judge Dickbrain from Utah. Want to know more (REAL) studies about the homosexican parents? Here's a link! 

Anyway, according to Slate, this judge once "was officially reprimanded for slapping a 16-year-old boy in court," and also threw a kid in the slammer for a bad report card, so he probably ought to be banned from being within a two-mile radius of a child, and certainly shouldn't be in a position of judicial authority over them.

Good luck, Beckie and April. You're good moms, sounds like, and we're really sorry this asshole judge cares more about his beliefs than he does about your kid.

[ Salt Lake Tribune / Slate ]