(Disclaimer: The opinions in this post do not necessarily reflect those of adoption.com.)
I spent the better part of this year writing the series, Adopting In the 50 States. Many states make it difficult for gay or lesbian people to adopt. Some outright ban gay and lesbian people from adoption. Up until last month, Florida was one of them. Florida law expressly forbade homosexuals from adopting. In September, the Florida Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling that stated the ban was unconstitutional.
The appeals court ruled the ban unconstitutional in 2008, and the Supreme Court upheld the ruling, stating:
“It is difficult to see any rational basis in utilizing homosexual persons as foster parents or guardians on a temporary or permanent basis, while imposing a blanket prohibition on those same persons.”
Florida’s Department of Children and Families will not appeal the ruling, and Florida’s Attorney General, Bill McCollum will not appeal the ruling either, effectively ending the state’s ban on adoption by gay and lesbian people.
In their decision, the appeals court justices wrote:
Given a total ban on adoption by homosexual persons, one might expect that this reflected a legislative judgment that homosexual persons are, as a group, unfit to be parents,” the appeal ruling states. “No one in this case has made, or even hinted at, any such argument.
“To the contrary, the parties agree ‘that gay people and heterosexuals make equally good parents.’
A number of studies have shown that gay parents do just as well as straight parents when it comes to raising children. For example, in a study of Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents, researchers found:
More than two decades of research has failed to reveal important differences in the adjustment or development of children or adolescents reared by same-sex couples compared to those reared by other-sex couples.
