Bert Lofton’s foster parents took him into their home at nine weeks old, despite the fact that they are white and he is black. They took him into their home even though he tested HIV-positive at birth.
There was no prejudice in their family, but prejudice in Florida law is threatening to take Bert away from the only family he has ever known.
Bert’s foster parents are gay.
Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau have been together for the past 20 years. In 1988, at the height of the public panic over the AIDS epidemic, they took in their first foster child from the pediatric AIDS unit where Steve worked as a nurse. They would eventually take in a total of six children, all with HIV.
Lofton and Croteau have risen to the challenge of their children’s illness. They make sure their children take their multitude of HIV medications. They make sure their kids get enough sleep. They provide them with a nutritious diet. They provide their children with the love and stability foster children can only dream of.
And it has paid off. Bert Lofton is no longer testing positive for HIV.
But his parents were not congratulated. Lofton and Croteau, who have overcome the obstacles of taking in foster children — some with troubled backgrounds, all with a deadly infectious disease — are being punished by the state of Florida.
When Bert ended up at the top of a stack of files of kids who have been in foster care too long, a caseworker sent a letter to Lofton and Croteau informing them the state would be finding Bert a new home.
Florida has now termed Bert “adoptable,” which is a euphemism for “marketable.” He is healthy now, and under the age of 14, which means the state can find him parents who aren’t gay.
Bert was once thought to be undesirable by the state of Florida. With a shortage of foster parents looking for a black baby, the chances of his being adopted were improbable. As an HIV-positive baby, finding Bert a home was nearly impossible.
Yet Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau didn’t see the unwanted child the state of Florida saw. They simply saw a child who needed a home, so they brought Bert into theirs. He has been loved and cared for in that home for all of his 11 years.
The state of Florida thought gay parents were good enough to care for a terminally ill child, but not a healthy child. Now Bert is “adoptable,” but not to Lofton and Croteau.
Although they want to adopt Bert, they are prevented from adopting a child because they are gay. First Florida deemed a 9-week-old child undesirable, and now his loving parents.
Bert’s family doesn’t look like the Brady Bunch, but they have all the makings of a perfect family. Gay parents with five HIV-positive children of different races live together, love each other and make it work.
The government has effectively ended Bert’s happy home life. Now that Bert has his physical health, the state is taking away his emotional health by removing him from the only family he has ever known.
If it weren’t for Lofton and Croteau, Bert would have been doomed to enter the foster care system. This is a system in which 350,000 children who have been abused and neglected by their birth parents are then rejected by foster family after foster family. Knowing they will inevitably be moved as soon as they get attached to their new family, many of these children remain detached all their lives, afraid to love. They long for the stability of a real family.
Caseworkers should focus on placing the 350,000 children who don’t have permanent homes. Bert already has a real family.
His parents have given their children everything they could, more than most parents could offer. In the name of old-fashioned family values that dictate the presence of a mother and a father, the state has forgotten what real family values are: love, caring and stability.
In all the ways that matter, the Lofton-Croteau family is just like any other family. They have fought for their rights to keep their children in an ACLU federal lawsuit challenging the ban on gay adoption in Florida.
In an affidavit, Steve Lofton said of Bert, “I love [him] deeply and want to protect him. But I cannot protect him unless I can adopt him.”
Under current law, adopting him is impossible, and the law may remain that way until after Bert is 18, but there is something that can be done. Someone — a judge, a caseworker — can look at Bert as not just a file, but as a person. Bert must be allowed to remain in foster care with his family.
Lofton said in the affidavit, “I have been his parent in every way … Every day I wake him up in the morning and help him get dressed and ready for school. I help him with his homework when he comes home from school … I make sure he is safe. He calls me ‘Dad.'”
Sure sounds like a dad to me.
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