Gay Today: World

Indiana Arrest: Marla Stevens, Respected Activist

Disrupts News Conference Called to Ban Foster Care & Adoptions

Shouts at Homophobes:
'You'd Steal Our Children!'

By Jack Nichols

Mayor Mark Lawler's office in Anderson, Indiana was the scene of a well-known lesbian activist's arrest Friday after she interrupted a news conference called by state representatives to introduce legislation that would ban adoptions and foster-parenting of children by same-sex couples. Marla Stevens, of the Indianapolis group, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Fairness, was protesting the proposed ban.

wburton.gif - 4.25 K Rep. Woody Burton The state lawmakers, Woody Burton, R-Greenwood, and Jack Lutz, R-Anderson, had planned to make the media aware of their plans, but were detained for an hour when Ms. Stevens seized the microphone in the mayor's conference room. Refusing to let anyone else speak, she vented her anger against those who, she said, "would steal our children."

Stevens, known for many years to Hoosiers as a respected advocate for the state's sexual-minority communities, refused to provide information about herself to reporters as she was led away in custody at 2:30 p.m. from a fifth-floor lobby near the mayor's office door. She was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

Bill Smith, an executive director of the Indianapolis-based Indiana Family Institute, had prepared to introduce the Republican legislators when Stevens leapt to the side of the podium: "I don't intend to stand and sit still while you defame me and millions of gay Hoosiers in the process," she announced angrily.

Smith begged the lesbian activist to permit Representatives Burton and Lutz to speak, but she climbed atop the conference room table and seated herself.

"Your actions are not civil and not deserving of anything more than my actions right now," she told those assembled.. She decried the religious-right front group, the Indiana Family Institute, saying, "you dare to go after our (gay and lesbian) families in this manner….You have created a situation where violence occurs against (gay men and lesbians) by hate-mongering."

"When you decide we are second-class citizens, you give aid and succor to those who would hurt us."

A reporter's tape recorder malfunctioned as she brought her hand down on the rostrum.

The controversy over gay adoptions and foster parenting had erupted in Indiana's Madison County when the county welfare department began processing the placement of an 8-year old female in the Indianapolis home of two gay men.

Two states, Florida and New Hampshire, already forbid such placements by law.

Anti-Gay sponsor, Rep. Lutz (known in some circles as Lutz the Klutz) said: "It's nothing against lifestyles…It's protection of the family and the protection of the children involved."

The Indiana Civil Liberties Union, however, sees the proposed anti-adoption legislation differently. Its executive director, John Krull, pointed out that: "Years of studies -- 25 years, in fact -- show that a person's sexual orientation actually has no bearing on their ability to raise children. What we have here is an attempt by the religious right to impose its beliefs on everyone else."
jacklutz.gif - 22.78 K Rep. Jack Lutz