Florida’s Gay Adoption Ban – The Policy Debate
The Supreme Court has decided not to hear a gay adoption case where Florida’s blanket law against homosexual adoptions was being challenged. The Christian blogs of World magazine and Sounding the Trumpet are pleased with decision, although the Court’s action doesn’t set any precedent.
World magazine writes, “The possibility of a child being adopted by a gay couple makes many young women less willing to consider placing their children for adoption.” Sounding the Trumpet adds, “All the major social studies have shown again and again that children grow up best in a family with both a father and a mother.” Yet all of these posts rest on assumptions that largely aren’t there. The Florida adoption statute offers no preference for married couples and expressly permits adults who are not married to adopt. Indeed, over a quarter of all adoptions are to single, heterosexual parents. The government aim that World and others are touting isn’t being met at all, through the law or in practice. Perhaps just as important, young children must often wait in foster care for years before being adopted, and a significant number never get adopted at all.
Is it in the best interests of children to be adopted by a caring homosexual parent who has raised them their entire life rather than languish in the state institution of foster care? I think it’s a highly debatable point with sound arguments on both sides. But either way we must understand that there are simply not enough qualified two-parent heterosexual couples willing to adopt to achieve the goal of two parent mother/father households.
20 Responses to “Florida’s Gay Adoption Ban – The Policy Debate”
“The possibility of a child being adopted by a gay couple makes many young women less willing to consider placing their children for adoption.”
What kind of statement is that? Is World saying that women, fearing a gay couple would adopt their kid, would choose to keep their kid instead of giving the kid up for adoption? Or are you saying that women, considering the fact that a gay couple would adopt their kid, would rather have the kid aborted (murdered) than adopted by a gay couple.
Well, Daniel, when you consider that this:
http://us4him.net/blog/index.php?p=456
is one fairly typical conservative response to gay adoption, it’s really not surprising that even abortion suddenly looks plausible.
I commend Josh for his stance here, and I even follow him (with considerable regret) in his analysis on why the Court did not take the case. Even a brief reading of the Lofton case makes it clear how wrong the situation is in Florida: The Lofton family–two men who ALREADY HAVE five foster kids, in the Florida system, no less–clearly deserves adoption rights.
“World magazine writes, “The possibility of a child being adopted by a gay couple makes many young women less willing to consider placing their children for adoption.”
That is over the top, since all the mother has to do is a closed adoption, where she has direct control of who will get to adopt the child. Attributes she wishes the family to have such as income level, education, religion, and yes, sex of the couple, can all be considered.
And if she hasn’t heard of this process, she has been living in a cave with only a copy of “Oliver Twist” instead television or the newspaper for past couple of decades.
we must understand that there are simply not enough qualified two-parent heterosexual couples willing to adopt to achieve the goal of two parent mother/father households.
I don’t think this is true. There are hundreds of thousands of couples in this country on waiting lists for adoption. Many (very many) American couples have given up on adopting a native-born child and are adopting children from China, Russia, etc.
Kids don’t languish in foster care because no one is willing to adopt them. For the reasons that occurs, read the Jane Galt article linked above.
Yes, but Jane Galt’s post doesn’t change the analysis at all. She writes, “Most couples (I’m sure not all) seem to be pretty flexible on race, but they don’t want a kid older than two or three, certainly not one older than five.” These are the kids that are most often at the center of homosexual adoption disputes and they’re the kids that often remain in foster care when not adopted.
That’s why the statistics are important: 112,000 children waiting for adoption are 8.2 years old, and had spent 38 months in continuous foster care. *(DHHS) In Florida 18% of children have been in foster care for five years or longer and 4,092 children are available for adoption. Many of these children have “special needs” and only single or homosexuals are willing to adopt them.
I’ll also note that Florida does not bar homosexuals from serving as foster parents, only adoptive parents.
It may be true that most cases in the public eye today involve homosexual couples wanting to adopt older children (in many cases I’ve seen, a person wants to adopt his/her partner’s child from a previous hetero relationship), but that would almost certainly not remain the case if full adoption rights were granted to homosexuals. I think the case you bring up (a child being adopted by a homosexual who has cared for him/her since birth or early childhood) is relatively rare
Also, I personally know too many wonderful foster parents to make a general conclusion that children would be better off being adopted by a homosexual couple (or individual) than to remain in foster care.
I personally know too many wonderful foster parents to make a general conclusion that children would be better off being adopted by a homosexual couple (or individual) than to remain in foster care.
That may be, and as I said there are sound arguments supporting that, but I think it’s important that all parties to the debate understand the current statistics show that thousands of older kids wait in foster care to be adopted.
I’d agree, though, that if the Florida law were changed homosexuals would vie for adopting much younger kids, as heterosexuals do now.
Regarding the cases of older and/or “special needs” children who are harder to find adoptive homes for, I think a lot of people would think it’s OK for them to be placed with homosexuals rather than remain in the state system.
But frankly, I think this point may be something of a “bait and switch” on the part of homosexual activists. I don’t see any reason why, if homosexual couples were to be granted equal adoption rights, those couples wouldn’t prefer to adopt the same children that hetero couples prefer. So we’d be in more or less the same situation we’re in now.
Oops. Looks like Josh and I were thinking the same thing, except he thought it and typed it faster.
“Regarding the cases of older and/or “special needs” children who are harder to find adoptive homes for, I think a lot of people would think it’s OK for them to be placed with homosexuals rather than remain in the state system.”
Clearly, then, it’s not about the best interests of the children, but rather, once again, about punishing gays for being gay. Don’t let them have the desireable kids (infants). Don’t let them have the desireable social status (married).
As long as gays are restrained to being co-habitating unmarried parents of screwed-up, late-adopted children from abusive/neglectful bioligical families, gays will never have a family that looks “normal” — which is very important because if gays start having normal-looking families, we’re all done for.
No, Aaron, it is about the best interests of the children. Much as you may disagree, there are a lot of people (maybe even a majority in the U.S.) who sincerely believe that the best situation for children is to grow up with both a mother and a father.
However, as Josh said, there may not be enough qualified hetero couples who are willing to adopt older or “special needs” children. In those cases, it may be preferable for those kids to grow up with gay parents than in foster care. In other words, the order of preference would look like this:
1) Hetero couples
2) Gay couples
3) Foster care
I don’t know how to make this any clearer. It’s simply not about “punishing gays.”
Other than making it yet again clear that for some reason the “worst” heterosexual couple is always better than the “best” gay couple.
The “worst” heterosexual couple will not qualify to adopt kids. The screening process is quite rigorous, as any couple who has gone through it can attest. So unless you advocate taking kids away from biological parents deemed “unfit” by the state (which I presume you do not, except in the most extreme cases), your complaint is unfounded.
Should homosexuals be able to adopt? — the policy
Joshua Claybourn from In the Agora picked up on my comments on the Supreme Court deciding not to hear the challenge to Florida’s ban on homosexuals adopting. Although he agreed with the fundamental point that legally the Supreme Court should only dec…
The idea of gays adopting at all does throw a huge monkey-wrench into the “marriage is between a man and a woman” argument, so I can see why the branch of conservatism opposed to the latter would oppose the former.
If a gay couple has adopted children, it would certainly be in the best interests of said children that their parents be married, to ensure the maximum stability of the family unit.
So if we let gays adopt, suddenly we’ve got yet another reason to allow gay marraige — for the CHILDREN. And lord knows the conservatives don’t want to be on the wrong side of that argument. Sobbing kids saying “I just want mommy and mommy to be married so we can be a FAMILY” would not be a fun picture for such folks.
The whole thing is inconsistent with the FL Constitution and its interpretation. Whether you support the decision or not, it’s out of place.
Aaron, again you’re making wild assumptions about why conservatives oppose gay adoption, rather than answering the point that children need both a mother and a father.
Now, I will grant you that some people out there oppose gay adoption because of their ignorant and/or biased views about homosexuals. However, your idea that conservatives oppose gay adoption for tactical purposes in the argument over gay marriage is way, way off base.
Eric, the waiting list situation isn’t as straightfoward as you made it look. White parents who want to adopt a white baby born in the U.S. are on waiting lists. If those are the only kids you care about or if those kids are somehow more important than the kids on long waiting lists who aren’t white or weren’t born in the U.S., then your argument might make sense.
Jeremy, did you read the Jane Galt article I linked?
“I was acquainted, a few years back, with a couple that was trying to adopt; the husband was a research analyst, and his conversation on the topic was, er, excruciatingly thorough. There are a number of children in the system, disproportionately minority ones, who can’t get adopted. But that isn’t because they’re minorities; if you’ll notice, many of the couples who can’t adopt here end up going to China, South America, or Africa for babies. This couple was desperate for a baby; they were happy to take any or all races. But they were stymied by the system.”
If you have hard facts to overturn Jane’s argument, I’d love to see them.
Eric, I could not agree with you anymore. I would also like to add in a point. These conservative Christians (not all of them) are making their claims from the bible, not from facts. I know several people who were adopted by gay parents and they turned out just fine. They did not turn out to be gay, they all recieved 4.00 and graduated at the top of their class.
They told me the only people that made fun of them were the Christian Conservatives themselves.
Onemore thing, has anyone tallked to the kids who don’t have parents and can’t be adopted because of a discrimanative law? I wonder how they feel? I wounder if we are showing them that discrimination is o.k. I wonder why the kids don’t have a say in this, considering it is the kids we are talking about?