The Gillettes told me that their parents had been involved, in various ways, with the civil-rights movement, and that their own commitment to issues of racial justice deepened a few years ago when, for nineteen months, they served as foster parents to a small African-American boy.
Then there are those men and women who offer to serve as foster parents.
I live in New York, a place where lesbian and gay people can legally marry, adopt children and serve as foster parents.
Pocahontas, representing the spirit of America, literally shields Smith from injury and serves as foster mother, protecting colonists from famine and attack, achieving mythic status as a heroic mother, and preserving, nurturing and legitimizing America as a country.
By the time he became president of the Urban League, Mr. Walcott and his wife, Denise, had four children: two of their own and two whom they adopted after serving as their foster parents.
But in November, the couple got word that the children would be removed: A 1983 robbery conviction automatically disqualified Azim T. from serving as a foster or adoptive parent.
After losing her paralegal position at a Manhattan law firm where she had worked for nine years, Ms. Nelson, 34, said she took a temporary job, then decided to focus on volunteering and serving as a foster mother.
nytimes.com/topics SLIDESHOW: GRANDPARENTS FOUND Images of Hope Meadows, a shuttered Air Force base in Illinois where the elderly can join a program in which they serve as surrogate grandparents to children in foster care.
So it is welcome news that a state judge in Arkansas has struck down a pernicious 2008 state law that barred even qualified same-sex couples and other unmarried couples living together from serving as adoptive or foster parents.
At the same time, the number of LGBT adults serving as guardians and foster parents (many of them wanting to adopt) grows daily.
At the same time, the number of LGBT adults serving as guardians and foster parents -- many of them wanting to adopt -- grows daily.
