"It's not about whether you're gay or straight or have a marriage certificate or not," Olivia said in defense of her mother, Chris Johnson, and Johnson's partner, Lorie Hutchinson.

"I just want to know what problems she thinks we'll have growing up with wonderful people who love us," she told the audience Thursday night.

At Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson's second Freedom Forum about Utah's 5-year-old law blocking gay adoption, Olivia and Ruzicka were the unintentional focus of discussion - Olivia as an example of a child caught in limbo by state law and Ruzicka as the only speaker in favor of the ban.

Noting she had prayed for guidance before the discussion, Ruzicka calmly argued that child rearing is based on traditional, complementary gender roles - nurturing, sympathetic mothers and matter-of-fact, stoic fathers. Gay couples are a poor substitute, Ruzicka said.

"Adoption is not about the parents. Adoption is about the children," the Eagle Forum director said. "Children should not be used to further political agendas. Children are not toys."

Ruzicka's ideas are fine in theory, Salt Lake City Democratic Rep. Roz McGee countered, but thousands of children languish in foster care, unwanted by the married couples state lawmakers concluded would be best qualified to adopt. "We don't have perfectly matched pairs of parents waiting to adopt," she said.

And attorney Suzanne Marelius, who adopted her two teenage daughters before the ban went into effect, says Utah voters' approval of Amendment 3 only complicates life for gay couples and their children. The constitutional change denies gay couples the right to marry and blocks the state from granting any rights "substantially equivalent" to marriage, including custody of children.

"We have another big cloud over this," she said. "Amendment 3 has made the situation far worse."