Burnt Orange Report

Rick Perry on Talton's Amendment

By Byron LaMasters

Rick Perry has offered his opinion on the gay foster care ban. He predicts that it will be taken off in committee, but will sign it either way. The Houston Chronicle reports:

Legislators writing the final version of a bill overhauling the state's Child Protective Services system will kill a controversial provision that would prohibit homosexuals from being foster parents, Gov. Rick Perry predicted Thursday.

But if the House-approved ban survives, Perry said he would sign the measure, provided it was adequately funded and made other necessary improvements in the embattled agency.

"I don't think it (the amendment) is going to be on there (the bill) when it comes to my desk," he said. "This bill's too important to have it bogged down." [...]

Perry said he didn't think the House amendment against gay foster parents, which faces strong opposition from senators, will survive a House-Senate conference committee.

But he added, "If the bill has the funding in it (and) if it does the things that we've laid out needs to happen, I'm going to sign the bill if that amendment's on it or not.

"CPS is really important, getting it fixed," Perry said, noting he had declared the legislation an emergency in the wake of a series of highly publicized deaths of children who weren't adequately protected by the agency.

Perry said that in an "ideal world" he would want foster children placed with "a family that had a mom and a dad."

But gay foster parents who are "loving and caring," he added, are "better than having the kids being abused, obviously."

Well, it's not obvious to Robert Talton.