Wanna Help?

ok, so all of you who said that you’d help with this whole adoption push, but you don’t live in Utah so you don’t know what to do?

I have something for you.

We’re creating a banner for our Rally and to use when we march at Pride day (if the legislation doesn’t pass this year).  The idea for a banner came out of the study that was released that said that there were 1226 children being raised by lgbt families in Utah.  The media outlets are saying that’s a small number of children, and maybe it is compared with the total number of children in this state, but it’s still a significant number.  We’ve had so many incomprehensible numbers of people thrown at us (casualty counts in Iraq or Katrina, for example) that numbers have sort of lost their meaning.  So we wanted to do something visual to show how many children 1300 is made up of (we’re rounding up because most of us have children who were born after 2005 when the data was gathered). 

We thought about balloons, but they’re not allowed in the capitol rotunda.  We thought about teddy bears or dolls, but we don’t have the money to buy that many teddy bears.  We thought about ribbons, but we’re not allowed to attach anything to the walls… finally someone came up with the idea of doing a big banner with pictures of children (hopefully 1300) to put a face on the discrimination. 

The problem is, the number of people who are actively working to push this legislation through is relatively small (compared to the number of people and children who will benefit) and pooling pictures of our children and our friends children together we’ve got less than 100. 

This is where you can help.  We need to finish collecting the photos by the end of the month (tomorrow the 31st).  If you’re willing to let a picture of your kid be on our banner to stand in for a child in Utah whose picture we can’t get, we would be unspeakable grateful.  There will be no names attached to the banner, just pictures of anonymous kids.  We’re looking for headshots, with minimal detail so the impact of kidness comes through. 

To make this easy, I’ve created a flickr group for people on flickr to send their pictures to. It’s called  Utah Fair Adoption Laws.  Or you can email me your pictures.  They need to be over 100dpi to look good, so big files are going to be best. 

And to show you all that I’m not above using my own kid for emotional manipulation…

Sassa says… “the current prejudice against lesbian families in Utah law is a travesty of the purported “family values” that this state supposedly endorses; when I think about how vulnerable I am to custodial disruption in the wake of a tragedy involving the mommy who carried me in her tummy, it makes me weep for the state of humanity.”

Also:

“Don’t make me come over there and kick your ass into action!”