May is National Foster Care Awareness month, a time when our country and Congress need to pay attention to the plight of the more than 424,000 children living in foster care. But we need to do more than be aware about this issue, we need to act.

Recently the Every Child Deserves a Family Act was introduced in the House by Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) along with more than 30 other co-sponsors.  A companion bill will be introduced in the Senate soon.

The bill would ensure that our country is doing everything possible to move children out of the foster care system and into permanent loving homes. It would eliminate discrimination in foster and adoption placement policies based on the marital status, sexual orientation or gender identity of the prospective parents.

Time is running out. If we don’t address the current patchwork of state laws, 25,000 of the foster children eligible for adoption will “age out” of the system this year without finding a family.

There is more reason for urgency. In recent weeks, we’ve seen attempts by lawmakers and partisan policymakers at the state level to politicize this issue and to make this an issue over whether qualified parents, who happen to also be lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, should be able to adopt.

It happened in Virginia, where proposed regulations that would have eliminated discrimination in foster care and adoption were rejected, at the request of Virginia’s Governor and Attorney General.

It happened in Arizona where Governor Jan Brewer recently signed a bill giving a married man and woman “placement preference” in adoption over single adults.

And it was narrowly avoided in Illinois where a state Senate committee considered a bill that would have allowed religiously affiliated child welfare agencies to refuse a person's adoption or foster home application if that person was in a civil union.

These efforts push a political agenda at the expense of hundreds of thousands of children who are at their most vulnerable.  It may be in the best interests of politicians looking to gain attention, but it is not in the best interests of these children.

There is no debating the fact that expanding the potential pool of parents is a good thing for children in foster care – plain and simple.

There is also no debating the qualifications of someone to parent based on their sexual orientation. Today there are more than 1 million lesbian and gay parents raising 2 million children in our country.

More than 30 years of research on this issue has come to the same conclusion – that children raised by gay and lesbian parents have the same advantages, developmental cycles and social and psychological adjustments as children raised by straight parents.

All of the major professional organizations in the fields of medicine, psychology, law, and child welfare have taken official positions multiple times in support of the ability of qualified LGBT and unmarried couples to foster and adopt.

There have also been recent attempts by politicians to question the ability of single parents to raise healthy children. The reality is that one in four children in this country is currently being raised by a single parent. Two and a half million families are headed solely by fathers. One and half million kids are being raised by grandparents.

The truth is that today’s American families are headed by parents who are divorced, single, and partnered, as well as married. They are raising their children to love their country, respect their neighbors, and be valuable members of their community. The 424,000 children currently in foster care deserve the same chance.

We simply cannot afford to exclude millions of prospective parents willing to take these children into their families simply because of their sexual orientation, marital status or gender identity. This is not in the best interest of the hundreds of thousands of children in the foster care system. And it is not in the best interest of our country.

That is why the Every Child Deserves a Family Act is so important and we encourage Congress to ensure that this month, national foster care awareness translates into action.