Diane Silver felt the same fears as many other parents when her son was born.

“How do you get enough sleep through the night? Wow,” Silver, a Lawrence resident, said. “How do you learn to be a parent? Are you going to drop the kid? Are you going to break ’em?”

But Silver was different from many other parents in one respect: She is gay. Her partner, Patty Doria, was the child’s birth mother — leaving Silver with few legal rights to the boy when Doria died in 1993. She managed to retain custody with the consent of Doria’s family.

“Being a lesbian or a gay parent is no different than being any other kind of parent,” said Silver, who asked that the name of her 19-year-old son be withheld to protect his privacy. “Your issues are raising a happy, healthy child.”

It turns out that Silver and Doria weren’t that unusual among their peers. A report by the Urban Institute suggests that gays and lesbians in Kansas are family-oriented — the state ranked eighth nationally in the percentage of same-sex couples who have a child under age 18 in the household.

On Tuesday, Kansas voters will decide whether to approve a state constitutional amendment that would prohibit gays and lesbians from marrying. Gay families like Silver’s, however, already have few legal protections.

‘Startling’

Gary Gates, now a senior research fellow at UCLA’s law school, co-authored “The Gay and Lesbian Atlas” for the Urban Institute last year.

With Jason Orst, he determined where and how gay couples lived using the results of the 2000 Census — measuring the number of gay couples by tracking the number of respondents who said they lived with an unmarried partner of the same sex.

Diane Silver, left, and Patty Doria celebrate with their son at a birthday party in 1988. Doria, the birth mother, died five years later, and Silver raised their child.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kansas wasn’t a gay gathering place. The state ranked 45th nationally for the per-capita rate of gay couples, with just under 4,000 such couples among the state’s 2.68 million residents.

But one-third of those Kansas couples had a child under 18 in the household, Gates told the Journal-World. Nationally, he said, about 25 percent of gay couples had children.

“That’s probably one of the most startling findings we observed,” Gates said of the national parenthood numbers.

Most of the children in those households, he said, were the product of a previous heterosexual union by one of the parents. But gay and lesbian couples are more likely than heterosexual couples to adopt — 4 percent of gay parents have adopted, Gates said, compared with 2 percent of heterosexual parents.

The Kansas Children’s Service League handles adoptions for the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services. Sandra Dixon, vice president of child welfare services, said the agency does not track how many children go to gay parents.

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“We hope our focus would be on finding the right family for a child, and not talking about the various demographics involved,” she said.

But Alan Hazlett, a Topeka lawyer and past president of the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys, said he wasn’t surprised.

“Kansas is a pretty family-oriented state,” he said. “It appears that that extends to gays and lesbians here, as well.”

‘No mechanism’

Married couples can jointly adopt a child in Kansas, but unmarried couples can’t — only one of the partners has legal custody of the child. Gay marriage is already illegal in the state.

“Two unmarried people living in a household cannot adopt as a couple, and it doesn’t matter about their sexual orientation,” Dixon said.

That presented Silver with a potential problem when Doria died. Legally, Silver said, Doria’s mother or brother could have claimed custody of the couple’s son. They agreed to leave the boy with Silver.

“They knew what kind of parent I was,” she said last week, “and they knew it would be terribly hurtful to my son, if he had lost both parents at the same time.”

Hazlett said the situation becomes a problem when gay couples split.

“Technically speaking, in the pure sense of the legality of it, there’s no divorce and there’s no mechanism for them to gain those rights,” he said.

The marriage amendment, Hazlett said, shouldn’t alter that situation.

“Strictly from the legal sense, I don’t think it would necessarily have an impact on that,” he said.

But Hazlett said the amendment could change the climate for adoption. He said he questioned “whether it would make judges less likely to grant adoption to a single person who is apparently gay or lesbian.”

‘Hard to tell’

The Rev. Jerry Johnston of Overland Park’s First Family Church helped lead the push to put the amendment on the ballot. He said he didn’t believe the amendment would change the legal situation for gay families.

“What legal rights do they have right now?” he said. “I think we can operate from the premise of the legal rights they have right now.”

Johnston was skeptical that gays and lesbians have much interest in forming families.

“The homosexual lifestyle,” he said, “is non-family oriented.”

Silver, who has campaigned against the amendment, disagreed.

“We’re Kansas,” she said. “We’re very family oriented.”

She said she’s not sure how the amendment would affect gay parents in Kansas.

“If the amendment failed, nothing will change,” Silver said. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing will change. I would not have had more rights as a co-parent. Children of lesbians and gays will not be protected any more than they are now. Nothing changes

“If it passes,” she said, “it’s hard to tell.”