Bush's baby steps. (my perspective).

When I was 12, I passed a young mother on the street who was pushing a stroller with her 2-year-old daughter inside. The child was Vietnamese, the mother Caucasian, and together they looked so joyful that I decided then and there that that was the way I would become a mother when I grew up: by adopting a child from another culture.

I still can't explain why that chance encounter made such an impression on me. Perhaps it was because I was raised in the cookie-cutter suburb of Levittown, N.Y., where difference was a thing to be spied, tried, and rectified. And just as this family was happily different, I suspected I was as well. Or perhaps it was because something mystical draws any two, three, or more people together as family.

But whatever the reason, this is the image of motherhood I carried with me for 25 years--until I fell in love with Kate, the most beautiful and intelligent woman I had ever known and one who was, for all intents and purposes, from another culture: a wealthier, more intellectual, and more worldly one. The fact that she wished to give birth to a child, I later realized, also meant that I would become an adoptive mother, only with a sweet, unexpected twist, since--thanks to New York law--I could, and did, adopt the child born to the woman I love.

In my experience the discovery of true love is like this: If you go looking for it, you won't find it. It must find you. The best we can do is to be open, honest, and prepared to cherish it when it comes.

Knowing this to be true, I found President Bush's recent appearance with Bruce Willis to announce his new adoption initiative so unsatisfying. By launching a new federal adoption campaign featuring Willis and first lady Laura Bush, the president said he hoped to "make adoption easier and a more common part of our life in America."

While help is surely needed, this was a mere baby step dressed up as a celebrity photo op. "Every year American families adopt tens of thousands of children," Bush said with Willis at his side. "Yet there are many more in [the foster care] system whose deepest desire is to become a member of a family."

How true. And yet how unhelpful for the boy that Douglas Houghton, a clinical nurse and gay man, has raised for the past seven years, ever since the boy's biological father, because he was overwhelmed by his young son's medical needs, asked him to. How unhelpful for 11-year-old Bert, born HIV-positive and cared for since infancy by partners Steve Lofton and Roger Croteau. And how unhelpful for countless other foster children like these who cannot be adopted by the parents who are caring for them because of Florida's ban on adoptions by gays and lesbians. Contrary to both professional advice and common sense, Florida law--like some judges in other states--considers a parent's sexual orientation more relevant than his or her demonstrated ability to raise a child.

Maybe I'm asking a lot, but the president could have used--and still can use--the power of his bully pulpit to help those children languishing in foster care because they are considered "less desirable": HIV-positive or disabled or too old or not white. Often these are the children to whom gay men and lesbians offer the only option for a stable, loving home. President Bush could easily get brother Gov. Jeb Bush on the phone and exhort him to let Houghton, Lofton and Croteau--and Rosie O'Donnell, for that matter--adopt their foster kids.

"No family is perfect, but every family is important," Bush said when signing the Promoting Safe and Stable Families law in January. And that is precisely what I want my son, who is now nearly 3, to believe. But until that sentiment is made a reality through equal legal protections for all families, I would hate to have to explain to him why so many remarkable lesbian and gay parents can open their homes and hearts to the nation's neediest children but are blocked when they try to make those relationships permanent through adoption.

Bennett runs HRC FamilyNet, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation GLBT family project. Find a link to the HRC FamilyNet at www.advocate.com.