Faith and Values: Added family security a necessity with today’s political discourse

There is a Buddhist practice I used to struggle with: the instruction to look at every person as if they were once your mother – someone who, in another life, cared for you completely, asking nothing in return. I couldn’t get there. My own mother chose her religion over me. The idea of universal maternal love felt like a cruelty. Then Stanley arrived, and I finally understood it from the other side.

Stanley Francis can’t do anything for himself yet. He can’t eat without me and my wife, sleep safely without us, face this world without us. To care for someone in that total, ungrudging way – to show up not because it’s easy but because they need you to – is what that practice is pointing at. I didn’t learn it from my mother. I’m learning it from my son.

Earlier this month, we made it official in a Spokane County courtroom. My wife, our 2-month-old and our chosen family packed into rows of seats on a Friday. We were there to do the paperwork that would give Stanley the most ironclad legal protection Washington state could offer. Second-parent adoption. A court order. Something no shifting political wind could easily undo.

It was beautiful.

People stood up and said things that made me weepy. They vouched for me, told the court I would be a good parent. They said they saw me as family – a word that hasn’t always meant safety for me, not since my parents walked out. These were my people. The ones who showed up. And they showed up in a courtroom, on a Friday morning, to say it out loud in front of a judge.

There is a Christian tradition of bearing witness – of showing up to declare that something is true and sacred and real. That’s what they did. The adoption was already real in every way that mattered. What happened in that courtroom was the world catching up to what was already holy.

Afterward, there were photos and food and the giddiness that comes from doing something that matters. Stanley smiled through most of it, the way only a 2-month-old can – oblivious to the significance of the moment and somehow making it more significant because of that.

I want to hold onto all of it. And I also can’t stop thinking about the fact that it shouldn’t have been necessary.

Second-parent adoption exists because being married and being listed on a birth certificate isn’t always enough. Not in every state. Not in every courtroom. Not in a country where the legal landscape for LGBTQ+ families can shift depending on which way the political winds are blowing. I wanted the bulletproof kind of protection. Even after marriage equality, adoption creates the strongest, most legally durable parent-child relationship available. It’s a court order, not just a document. Other states have to recognize it.

That matters right now. Enormously.

We are living in a political moment when rights that felt settled are being relitigated. When families like mine are being used as political fodder. When the question of whether both of Stanley’s parents are his parents – legally, irrefutably – is not something I’m willing to leave to chance.

So I did the paperwork. I stood in the courtroom. I cried when my friends said I was family.

The Buddhist practice I once couldn’t access asks us to extend that same fierce, unconditional care outward – to see every person as someone who once held us when we couldn’t hold ourselves. I’m still working on that. But I understand now, in a way I didn’t before, what it is asking. It’s asking us to love the way I love Stanley. Without condition. Without exit.

Someday, when Stanley is old enough to understand, I’ll show him the photos from that day. The ones where everyone is beaming. I’ll tell him about the people who came, what they said, how much he was wanted before he even knew what wanting was.

And I’ll hope that by the time he’s old enough to have a family of his own, none of this will be necessary anymore. That the world will have caught up, at last, to what is already holy.

Tracy Simmons, a longtime religion reporter, is a Washington State University scholarly assistant professor and the editor of FāVS News, a website dedicated to covering faith, ethics and values in the Spokane region.