Children's Groups Criticize Florida's Ban on Gay Adoptions
By Terri Somers, Staff Writer
Originally published in the Sun-Sentinel, February 21, 2002
Several of the nation's most respected children's advocacy groups told a federal appeals court Wednesday that Florida's ban on gay adoption hurts kids.
Florida's law doesn't have any basis in child welfare and it "frustrates the best interests of children because it denies children awaiting adoption the benefits of permanent, loving families," the groups wrote in a brief filed with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.
The brief was filed by a number of advocacy groups, including the Child Welfare League of America, a coalition of public and private agencies that sets national standards for child care. It supports an appeal filed with the court last week by the ACLU, claiming Florida law discriminates against lesbians and gay men who seek to adopt, and the children raised by lesbian and gay caregivers who cannot be adopted by them.
The ACLU wants the appeals court to overturn a ruling handed down last summer in Miami by U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King. King said the Florida Legislature has the power to promulgate a law that says children should be adopted only by a traditional family unit of a mother and a father.
"Today, the nation's most respected voices for children have made it clear that this law is not helping anyone," said Matt Coles, director of the ACLU Lesbian & Gay Rights Project. "In fact, it's hurting thousands of people—most urgently, the 3,400 kids in foster care in Florida who could be adopted right now if qualified parents came forward."
The ACLU filed its lawsuit on behalf of four gay men who are foster parents or guardians to children they now want to adopt. Florida's law, the toughest such ban in the nation, was passed in 1977 when singer Anita Bryant was leading the charge against gay rights. The law has withstood previous challenges in state court.
The brief filed by the child welfare groups cites a number of national studies that have shown children raised by loving gay parents show no more developmental, social and psychological problems than children raised by heterosexual parents.
"The factors associated with a child's positive adjustment have no relation to the parent's sexual orientation," the brief states. "Gay parents are just as likely as heterosexual parents to be able to provide for the best interests of children," it states.
Casey Walker, a Vero Beach lawyer who defended the state in court last year, said the law is constitutional because it serves two government interests: It expresses both the belief that children need to be raised by a married mother and father, and the state's moral disapproval of homosexuality.
