The woman speaking to the two dads | Photo: YouTube/What Would You Do?
The ABC reality series What Would You Do? is putting LGBTI front and center again.
In a recent episode, producers set up a scenario of two gay men having lunch at a restaurant with their daughter. While they’re enjoying their meal in peace, a woman starts shaming them, saying an ‘innocent child’ shouldn’t be raised that way.
The catch with this episode is that they ran the scenario in two very different states: New York and Kentucky.
Interspersed with scenes from both states, other patrons begin to look on as the women starts harassing the men.
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At the beginning of the episode, the host gives some information about same-sex adoption. In the United States, nearly 60,000 adopted or fostered children are in the care of same-sex couples.
26,000 of those children are with married same-sex couples.
LGBTI couples in New York can adopt ‘regardless of marital status’. In Kentucky, however, agencies can require couples to be married before adopting. They also didn’t allow same-sex coupls to adopt at all before marriage equality in 2015.
The episode has a part two, expanding on some of the scenes that unfold.
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The goodness of others
It’s hardly the first time the series has tackled issues relating to LGBTI discrimination.
Previously, they’ve done episodes on a lesbian waitress and a transgender woman shopping for clothes.
In the Kentucky scenario, some customers agree with the woman’s comments about the men, but not how she delivered them.
The last moment there, however, was more inspiring. The whole diner came to the couple’s defense, with an older man going up to the couple and simply talking to them to diffuse the situation. As the woman realized she was alone, she left to ‘thunderous applause’.
One man in New York eloquently spoke to the woman discriminating, telling her to back off.
‘You have two people celebrating and demonstrating love for a child,’ he says.
When the host approached him, he simply said: ‘It’s hard to sit back and not say something, to defend love. How can you not? Man and woman, woman and woman, man and man, two people are taking a child in, to help bring them up in the world. They’re teaching them about love and diversity. It’s a whole new world.’
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