And most people don’t really care who’s at the bottom of the barrel, so long as it’s not them. It’s the same old NIMBY refrain, over and over again.

Maybe it’s too much to expect that humanity will overcome the greed and tendency towards lack of empathy that are inherent in our nature?

But you’re quite right – if a study like this opens up the potential for support of LGBT rights in new areas (like anti-poverty activism) that may be a good thing. Allies are always helpful.

I know what it’s like to do a second parent adoption at least (checkered NGLTF map of who else can), and there’s already a ton of stuff in place to determine whether the home is “adequate” (including home visit by social worker to see the place the kid has already been thriving in since birth, etc.; affidavits by others as to one’s capacities as parent; “enough” income to provide for the kid is included, for sure — I think we even had to submit tax returns? or at least list our annual combined income? that part worried me, since it is under that considered necessary or optimum — for middle class people, at least — to raise kids in the Bay Area).

Anyway, folks who know more about the politics of adoptions could probably speak to this more, but I suspect that where it’s even possible for LGBT people to adopt, income-based bias already pertains, and that anything that might compound this (like the fact that the parents are same-sex or that a single parent is lesbian or gay) is already a demonstrable strain.

That said, I think you’re right: it would be perfectly like the religious right’s machine-like opposition to gay people that they would use this study against us. And I would also hope that advocates of greater family protections and more civil rights would be able to use a venal attack like this (were it to happen) to argue the justness of broader supports. I would hope that if low income people began to be discriminated against in a whole new way, that organizers and activists and people of conscience would step up. While there hasn’t been much support for class-conscious organizing in the Regan-Bush/Bush years, the rise of populist anger we’re seeing now might revive something. Who has the stomach for attacking the “have-nots” when the unchecked greed of a bunch of the “haves” has driven the economy over the cliff? I’m hoping fewer and fewer.