Recap!

Greetings once again – it’s been some time since our last post. To give a bit of a refresher on where we stand, let’s rehash some of the ground we’ve covered. To get things rolling, the first post introduced a brief history of the LGBTQ movement and many of the wins (and losses) endured on the path to equality. To get a little more specific, the second post then detailed the process of second-parent adoptions, a process many people know next to nothing about but one that has given countless LGBTQ+ couples a road to joint parenthood. Finally, our last post focused on the specific battle for the right of LGBTQ+ couples to marry and just how much the landmark 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court case meant for adoption rights in particular. For this fourth edition, we’re going to bring in the spotlight case of Sean Patrick Maloney and his own path both to Congress and family life.

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Biography

Sean Patrick Maloney was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, the last of six children in an Irish Catholic family, and grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire. Earning his Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the University of Virginia in 1988 and his Juris Doctor in 1992, Maloney’s entrance into politics came as a volunteer in Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and later developed into Clinton’s White House Staff Secretary and senior West Wing adviser. As a close member of Clinton’s staff, Maloney was also one of two representatives sent by Clinton to the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming who had been the victim of a brutal hate crime. At the time, Maloney called himself “the highest-ranking openly homosexual man on the White House staff.”

After a failed run for NY Attorney General in 2006 and a brief time as secretary to the governor from 2007-2008, Maloney turned to the private sector as a partner at various law firms from 2009-2011. Then, in March 2012, he announced his plans to run for the 18th Congressional District of New York. Campaigning as a moderate, Maloney beat out four challengers in the Democratic primary and proceeded to knock out Republican incumbent Nan Hayworth to become New York’s first openly gay member of Congress. Then, on the first day of his fourth term in 2021, he was elected chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the first openly gay member to earn the post. Running in the 17th district instead in 2022, Maloney narrowly lost reelection to Republican Mike Lawler.

Aside from politics, Maloney met his future husband Randy Florke in 1992 in New York City while helping to plan the Democratic National Convention. The pair became engaged on December 25, 2013, and since gay marriage was already legal in the state of New York, were able to marry the next year on June 21, 2014. In so doing, Maloney became just the second member of Congress to legally marry a same-sex partner while in office. They have since adopted three children and live in Cold Spring, NY (Wikimedia Foundation).

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Policy

One of the most emotional and significant moments of Maloney’s Congressional career came in the form of a challenge to the Committee on Oversight and Reform about a Trump-presidency regulation that could have allowed adoption agencies to refuse LGBTQ+ couples on religious grounds. In his speech to the committee, Maloney expressed his own emotional story in adopting his three kids with his partner in a plea to not deny children like his a home. One of his most potent moments went like this:

“It was because they [Adoption Alliance] had learned in the 1990s that there were certain types of kids who are not going to be adopted, where the circumstances of their birth, through no fault of their own obviously, was difficult or confronting for traditional adoptive parents, where there were issues of HIV or rape or incest, sometimes mixed with concerns about interracial adoption. And what these adoption agencies learned, to their credit, was that there were LGBT couples in cities like New York who would say yes to these children, not as an alternative to the straight couple that was going to raise them. As an alternative to never being adopted. Because no one was going to adopt these kids. And it was that insight, that LGBT couples were willing to cross lines of difference because they had experienced doing so in their own lives, that they had less preoccupation or hysteria with things like HIV, that they were more willing to adopt across lines of difference like race or religion, that there was an opportunity for kids that would not have a home to have a home . . . (Brut.)”

Patrick Maloney is not only a trailblazer for LGBTQ representation in Congress, but also an avid proponent of adoption rights for LGBTQ couples as well as the right of every child to be placed in a safe and loving home. To see a clip of Maloney’s story in the emotional process of adopting his three kids, see here.

 

Sources:

Brut. (2020, February 28). U.S. rep.’s plea for LGBTQ+ couples right to adopt. Brut. Retrieved March 18, 2023, from https://www.brut.media/us/news/u-s-rep-s-plea-for-lgbtq-couples-right-to-adopt-fc54ca45-e749-4af9-ad7f-837751920d13

Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, March 17). Sean Patrick Maloney. Wikipedia. Retrieved March 18, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Patrick_Maloney