Meet point man on 'gay' adoption

The emotionally explosive debate over homosexuals adopting children
has reached a fevered pitch with the recent adoption of a baby boy by
notorious sex advice columnist Dan Savage -- best known for his
"germ-warfare" attack against then-presidential candidate Gary Bauer --
as well as Utah legislation clarifying that state's ban on such
adoptions.

Senate Bill 63, sponsored by
Sen. Howard Nielson, R-Provo, makes changes to Utah's law prohibiting
homosexual couples from adopting children. Currently, the state bans
homosexual marriage, adoption and foster parenting outright.

Amended Feb. 16, the bill makes an exception for cases in which at
least one member of the couple has a blood-relationship with the child
it seeks to adopt. For example, the homosexual adult may be the child's
biological parent now separated from his or her spouse. However, the
exception does not immediately grant adoption or foster care -- it only
allows the request to be considered by state authorities.

Salon.com columnist Dan Savage

Utah's ban on homosexual adoption, and the current bill, which now
faces the state House of Representatives on its way to the governor's
desk, have been the target of homosexual activists in the state and on
the Internet. But as the legislation made its way through the Senate,
those favoring homosexual adoption have experienced a major public
relations nightmare in the high-profile case of Dan Savage, who, along
with his homosexual partner, recently adopted a baby boy.

What began as a journalism assignment to cover the Iowa caucuses
became a possible criminal investigation after Salon.com published sex advice columnist Dan Savage's
step-by-step account of his deliberate contamination of Bauer campaign
offices with the flu-bug, an act Savage now denies, as well as his
falsification of voter registration records.

In his column, "Stalking Gary Bauer,"
Savage details his fury over Bauer's stance on homosexuality and
describes his own "malicious -- even a little mean-spirited" plan to
volunteer at Bauer's Iowa campaign headquarters in order to infect the
candidate with the flu virus, from which Savage was then suffering: He
would saturate a pen with his flu-infected saliva and offer it to Bauer
when asking for an autograph.

Incredibly, he did just that. Offering Bauer the pen and a photo of
the baby boy Savage and his homosexual partner legally adopted last
year, saying "I talked his mother out of aborting him" and calling Bauer
his hero, Savage accomplished what he came for.

Mark Washburn, president of Capitol Resource Institute

But Savage didn't stop there, as he explained in his Salon article.
While Bauer staff members were away from the office, wrote Savage, he
started "licking doorknobs. The front door, office doors, even a
bathroom door. When that was done, I started in on the staplers, phones
and computer keyboards. Then I stood in the kitchen and licked the rims
of all the clean coffee cups drying in the rack," in case his pen-plan
didn't work, he admitted.

The nationally syndicated columnist also voted in the Iowa caucus
after illegally completing a voter registration form, falsely naming his
hotel's address as a permanent residence.

Savage may be getting more than he bargained for. Loras Schulte,
Bauer's Iowa campaign director who contracted the flu shortly after
Savage's foul prank, is planning to file a criminal voter-fraud
complaint against Savage. Bauer sympathizers are also considering a
civil suit against Salon.com, which published Savage's article.

"I don't want to be vindictive or un-Christian, but Christians aren't
supposed to be doormats. Somebody has to take a stand against this sort
of thing," Schulte told the New York Post.

David Talbot, Salon.com's founder, chairman and editor-in-chief,
issued a statement
when readers expressed their outrage at the column.

Talbot said Savage's column "was not what we had in mind" for a
political story. "Nevertheless, after reviewing the story carefully we
decided to run it. It was savage (no pun intended), powerful writing,
Swiftian in its desperate, satiric outrage at anti-gay discrimination.
Perhaps predictably, it engendered a comparable outrage in our readers."

"We still believe publishing the article was the right choice,"
Talbot continued, "but we also feel compelled to say: We didn't assign
Savage to infect Bauer. We don't condone or endorse what he says he
did."

Campaign for California Families director Randy Thomasson

Talbot has since adopted an official "no-comment" position when asked
about Savage, and has instructed the rest of his magazine's employees
not to comment as well, WorldNetDaily was told by a Salon spokeswoman.

Bauer's Iowa campaign director said legal and financial penalties
"are the only things these people respect."

Whether homosexual activists respect it or not, the Bauer campaign
stands a good chance of winning a case against the magazine and its
correspondent. According to the Iowa attorney general's office, if
Savage cannot prove he signed the registration form honestly, intending
to establish permanent residency in Iowa, he could face up to $7,500 in
fines and five years in jail.

As for charges stemming from his infected saliva-spreading spree:
Spitting on someone in Iowa fits the legal definition of simple assault,
and assaulting someone based on their religious or political affiliation
is a violation of the state's hate-crimes statute -- an offense
punishable by up to a year in jail.

But Savage now claims he didn't actually go through with his childish
coffee mug-licking plan. It was just a joke, he says, in reply to
Bauer's anti-homosexual marriage epithets.

Utah State Sen. Howard Nielson, R.-Provo

"In the context of my column, people understand sometimes I'm pulling
your leg, sometimes I'm not," Savage says. "In this case, people lacked
that context."

Besides, he says, his flu was way past the infectious stage and the
virus was already rampant when he arrived in Iowa.

"At that stage of the campaign, Bauer had probably been exposed to
everything -- shaking hands with thousands of people and picking up
babies," Savage said. "He was probably more of a threat to me."

While Savage may now seek cover by claiming parts of his column were
fictional, other parts have been independently verified. His falsified
voter registration form has been found, confirming he used his hotel
address as a permanent residence. And he admits he did cast a vote in
Iowa's Republican presidential caucus -- for Alan Keyes, reasoning that
Keyes would do the most damage to the GOP's chances.

"I think that it's unfortunate that one bad apple came to Iowa and
tried unsuccessfully to disrupt an important event in American
democracy," said Dee Stewart, executive director of the Iowa Republican
Party.

But Savage is quick to blame Iowa officials, who did not check his
identification at the caucus site to see if he really was a registered
Iowa voter.

"It was too easy to do," Savage says. "I don't want to go to jail in
Iowa. That's redundant."

The Salon columnist also admits having used the gnawed pen to get
Bauer's autograph, but says he did not talk his adopted son's mother out
of aborting the baby. In fact, he says, she chose Savage and his
homosexual partner through a Portland-based adoption agency as the
people she wanted to raise her child in an open adoption. Open
adoptions allow birth-mothers visitation rights.

Savage used his adoption experience as material for a book, "The Kid
-- What happened after my boyfriend and I decided to go get pregnant,"
published last year. The chronicle has endeared Savage to homosexual
adoption advocates and others.

Amazon.com,
in its review of the book, said, "The Kid is a wonderful, charming
account of real 'family values' that proves love knows no limits."

Entertainment Weekly said of the account:
"Intelligent, provocative, and disarmingly honest, this is Savage's
touching -- and irreverent -- love letter to his new son."

Savage's book, 'The Kid'

"Love letter" may not be exactly how most would characterize the
book. One of its early chapters is written for D.J., his then-unborn
child. In it, Savage advises the child not to read the book in which he
describes homosexual sex acts and calls D.J.'s mother a "gutter punk."

"It can be hard to put down a book that's all about you. God, for
example, likes to have the Bible read to him every Sunday in church, as
you would know if we had ever taken you into a church, and he never
seems to tire of it. If you insist on reading this book, I'll
understand. But take everything in it with a grain of salt, just as I
assume God takes everything in the Bible with a grain of salt."

Campaign for California Families
director Randy Thomasson told WorldNetDaily, "I feel very sorry for
[Savage's] boy. He is a vulnerable, impressionable little boy who is
now going to be taught to actually experiment with the homosexual
lifestyle. It's a terrible environment."

"[Savage] has rendered an unhealthy sentence on that child --
sentencing him to a life of despair, disease and, most likely, an early
death," Thomasson continued. "It's a fact that chain smoking will cut
years off a young man's life. But engaging in homosexual acts as a
lifestyle will kill off even more years. It's hypocritical for schools
to be teaching kids not to smoke, but not tell them 'be certain not to
engage in homosexual activity,' which is more unhealthy than smoking."

Interestingly, Savage provides health-related information in his
first book, "Savage Love," a collection of his sex-advice columns
printed in 28 alternative newspapers around the country and read by an
estimated 4 million people each week. Throughout that book's
outrageous, explicit and profane pages, Savage reveals his radical
homosexual behavior -- including his love of multiple sex partners,
aversion to condoms and promotion of sex acts too raunchy to re-print in
this article.

The author describes his book as "the incredible true story of how a
nice Catholic boy like me wound up giving sex advice to breeders for a
living."

"Breeders" are heterosexual couples in Savage-speak. His own fans,
when writing for advice, address him with, "Hey Faggot." But there are
terms Savage disapproves of, such as "partner."

"It's just so ... genderless," he writes in "The Kid." "Straight
people find it comforting, I guess, for its very genderlessness. ...
Straight people and press organs that want to acknowledge gay
relationships while at the same time pushing the two-penises stuff as
far out of their minds as possible love 'partner.' I hate it."

Thomasson, whose group regularly lobbies the California State
Legislature against homosexual rights legislation, observed, "Homosexual
activists say kids languish in adoption homes, but those are disabled
children. I don't see many homosexuals adopting them. They're all
blonde-haired, blue-eyed perfect babies."

"They're treating these kids as guinea pigs" for the social
experiment of homosexual families, added Thomasson. "It's really sad
that homosexuals are adopting these kids as props. They're not things,
they're not toys."

Mark Washburn, president of Capitol Resource Institute,
a California-based think tank, summed up
the issue of homosexual adoption this way: "By all objective standards,
homosexual relationships are the least stable in society, and Dan Savage
is the perfect example of that instability."