Legal News

Gay Rights Notches Victory with Florida Adoption Ruling

By Amir Efrati

It’s been a rough month for gay-rights proponents. The ban on gay marriage in California, which passed by voters on election day, has evoked strong feelings in the Poppy state, where some financial supporters of the ban have been called out, blacklisted or stepped down from prominent jobs amid the backlash. Also, gay-rights advocates there may have lost a usually predictable ally in their effort to overturn new ban, known as Proposition 8.

But there was some good news yesterday for backers of gay adoption rights. A state judge in Florida, the only state with a law prohibiting homosexual individuals and couples from adopting children, ruled that the 30-year-old ban is unconstitutional. That’s the second such ruling this year. Here are stories from the Miami Herald and NYT.

In Tuesday’s decision, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman permitted 47-year-old Frank Gill to adopt the 4- and 8-year-old boys he and his partner have raised for four years.

The Herald reports that Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office, which represented the state’s Department of Children & Families in the case, has already filed a notice of appeal, and the case is likely to end up before the state’s supreme court. The attorney general’s office had argued that gay men and lesbians are disproportionately more likely to suffer from mental illness or a substance abuse problem than straight people, rendering them less fit to parent — especially children in foster care who already are under tremendous stress.

But Lederman, in her 53-page order, dissected 30 years worth of psychological and sociological research, concluding that studies overwhelmingly have shown that gay people can parent every bit as effectively as straight people and do no harm to their children. In a similar ruling in August, Monroe Circuit Judge David John Audlin Jr. wrote that Florida’s gay adoption ban arose out of ”unveiled expressions of bigotry” when the state was experiencing a severe backlash to demands for civil rights by gay people in Miami.

The Supremes refused to hear a challenge to the Florida law in 2005, writes NYT. Other states, like Mississippi and Utah, effectively bar adoptions by same-sex couples through laws that prohibit adoption by unmarried couples.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 26, 2008 (boomark / email).