Adoption Ads Pulled From San Francisco S&M (Sadomasochism) Webpage

Article from: California Catholic Daily: www.CalCatholic.com

SF’s Human Services Agency Acts After CalCatholic Story

Publicity generated by California Catholic Daily’s story of August 11 “Adoptive Dads Sought on S/M Webpage” has caused the city of San Francisco to pull the AdoptionSF ads from San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter and the SF Bay Times.

The CalCatholic story reported that AdoptionSF, which is a collaboration between the city of San Francisco’s Human Services Agency and Family Builders by Adoption (who, until June 30, 2009, had been Catholic Charities adoptions’ partner) were running adoption ads featuring two adoptive men and a little boy on the “Mister Marcus” s/m page of the Bay Area Reporter. Subsequent to the original story, California Catholic Daily learned that similar AdoptionSF ads were also running on the “porn” page of the SF Bay Times, another homosexually-oriented publication. The ad on the SF Bay Times “porn” page showed two women and a teenaged girl.

The article’s author sent a letter to the Human Services Agency asking if they were aware of these ads, and on August 24 received a response from Mr. Trent Rohrer, executive director of the agency. Mr. Rohrer said, in part:

“We work in collaboration with Family Builders to recruit adoptive homes for foster youth, However, we were not aware nor would we ever authorize the use of these ads for any type of inappropriate websites and publications.

“Efforts have been made to contact a representative from Family Builders. We are in the process of resolving this matter and plan to pull the ads immediately. I am certain that the postings in the specific sites you mentioned must have occurred as the result of some type of error.”

When Family Builders signed its contract with the city and county of San Francisco on August 1, 2006, one of the requirements was: "Increasing the number of children adopted by Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) adults." Since the Bay Area Reporter and the San Francisco Bay Times are the two largest LGBT-oriented publications in the city, they would seem to be natural ways to reach that target demographic. Family Builders obviously thought so.