Lisa Belkin writes today about a new study finding not only that the sexual orientation of parents doesn't affect children's well-being but actually goes beyond that to recommend against policies that exclude gay and lesbian couples from adopting children. Florida, Mississippi, and Utah currently ban adoption by same-sex couples explicitly. An Arkansas law prohibiting unmarried, co-habitating couples from adopting passed by public referendum in 2008 is still being challenged in the courts.
Belkin writes that the study should, but probably won't, put the issue to rest. She points to several facts that should make the study seem more airtight to detractors than previous studies: the outcomes of the children weren't based on parents' self-reporting but on observations from third parties who dealt with the children, the study included gay men as well as gay women, and it had a control group of heterosexual couples who also adopted.
But if facts mattered to detractors, they would have dropped this issue long ago. Their claims, that children do best with a mother and father in the home, are so deep-seated in their religious world view that they still protest single-motherhood and cohabitation by straight couples who are not married. This is, to some extent, why I'm usually confused about why we still care about convincing the far, religious right. The court system is, luckily, designed to protect against the tyranny of the majority as in Arkansas. Achieving gay rights through the courts might be slow and perhaps less desirable than changing public attitudes. But in many cases it's a stopgap. Before public sentiment catches up, families are threatened and children remain without homes; those are immediate problems we can't wait 20 years to fix.
-- Monica Potts
