Coming out of the Closet by Ryan

Specific barriers that I perceived from the text “Coming Out of the Closet” by Ryan were in relevance to the use of the best interest standard. Social workers were found to weigh a high level of their influence upon their peers, supervisors, organizational context, and the larger sociocultural arena to form their decision of the evaluation of gay couples being suitable as adoptive parents. They also apply the systems theory and focus on the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational levels in their analysis and evaluations. Unfortunately, the majority of social workers are inclined to find that homosexual couples aren’t a good fit to be parents compared to heterosexual couples due to internationalized prejudice. A solution that Ryan discussed that would be best for reducing discrimination in social workers would be to hire LGBTQ employees to work with the consideration of placing parents with children.

One stereotype that Dan and his partner Terry encountered in “The Kid” by Dan Savage was the infertility seminar they were forced to attend to even be considered as applicants in the pool of potential parents. Considering the fact that they clearly know that two males are incapable of giving birth to a child, this was very embarrassing for them and seminars like this do not make LGBTQ families feel welcome. They handled the situation as well as they could and ignored negative implications and made themselves feel as welcome as possible. My reaction to this book was astonishing because of how heartfelt the storyline was, and how much it related to everyday problems that homosexual couples are faced with in our homophobic discriminatory world. My reaction to Oregon’s legal process of adoption was positive because of the amount of rights that were given to adoptive parents and mothers. I feel like this releases the burden of having to deal with numerous problems regarding the legal rights associated with raising a child, and