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Florida Adoption Ban Deemed Unconstitutional

Cara

Great news!  A 30-year-old ban on adoption by gay individuals and couples has been struck down by a Florida circuit court and ruled unconstitutional.

A Miami-Dade circuit judge Tuesday declared Florida’s 30-year-old ban on gay adoption unconstitutional, allowing a North Miami man to adopt two foster kids he has raised since 2004.

In a 53-page order that sets the stage for what could become a constitutional showdown, 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 since just before Christmas four years ago. A child abuse investigator had asked Gill to care for the boys temporarily; they were never able to return to their birth parents.

”This is the forum where we try to heal children, find permanent families for them so they can get another chance at what every child should know and feel from birth, and go on to lead productive lives,” Lederman said in court before releasing the order. “We pray for them to thrive, but that is a word we rarely hear in dependency court.”

”These children are thriving; it is uncontroverted,” the judge added.

Moments after Lederman released the ruling, attorneys for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced they would appeal the decision to the Third District Court of Appeal in Miami.

”We respect the court’s decision,” said attorney Valerie Martin, who had argued in support of the ban during a weeklong trial Oct. 1-6. But, she added: “Based upon the wishes of our client, the Department of Children & Families, we have filed a notice of appeal this morning.”

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.

Yeah, totally no prejudice there!

In any case, it’s very good news . . . and now we wait and see where it goes.

h/t Feministing

8 thoughts on Florida Adoption Ban Deemed Unconstitutional

  1. Ooh, that’s a very tough call. I live in GA, and like my home state, FL leans heavily to the right. Just because the state went blue for Obama doesn’t mean everything else became blue along with it. FL has a much older demographic and a very religous one at that. Legal battles regarding state constitutions are always harder to fight in the south and midwest moreso than in the west and northeast.

  3. 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.

    WTF?

    Do they think mental illness is distributed homogenously through a population like salt in seawater, with every gay man and lesbian having an equal level of this greater amount of mental illness and substance abuse?

    Honestly, I can’t comprehend how these people can’t smell bullshit this pungent.

    Come on! If they’re so damn worried about mental illness and substance abuse, the solution is to screen for mental illness and substance abuse, rather than screening for homosexuality as if that would effectively detect mental illness or substance abuse and not deliver such a spate of false negatives and false positives as to be completely and utterly useless.

  4. This is great news. Lots of studies have been done showing that not only are gay parents just as good as straight parents but some studies have shown children of gay parents are MORE adjusted than those parented by straight parents. I think the real reason so many straight people are afraid of gay marriage and gay parenting is because they know how pathetically they are failing at both and don’t want attention brought to their failures. Easier to project.

    Also, the drug abuse and mental illness attributed to gay folk is to a large extent a result of hate crimes, hate speech, discrimination, and the effort of isolated, often young, gay folks to cope with it. The high rates of depression and suicide are age-specific. Gay teens, 30% of whom are kicked out of their homes by their homophobic parents, have these high rates of mental illness, homelessness, and drug usage as a direct result of being ill-treated by straight people. So mental illness is not intrinsic to homosexuality, it is a side effect of oppression.

  5. It is so, so hard to find parents who are willing and able to adopt or foster a child. The list is already unbelievably short, why would anyone want to make it shorter?

  6. Man, the DCF can sit and spin on this one. I don’t know if there is a state where the foster system is in good shape and social workers aren’t so overworked and underpaid that they can’t manage their caseloads worth a damn, but Florida sure as hell isn’t it. That they want to keep kids they’ve had placed with these guys for four years from being adopted by these same friggin’ guys because honoes the gay is fucking ridiculous. We need good adoptive homes for kids who can’t go back to their biofamilies for whatever reason. Deciding that it can’t be with a gay couple on account of gay-cooties is not helping.

  7. Kyra,

    Of course they can smell it…they’re not stupid. I think there is one consideration missing from your take on this: There is no lie too brazen for right-wing zealots to speak in pursuit of the (according to them) greater good. Some anti-gay and anti-choice activists, including some clergy, have actually said this in public. In this particular case, they know very well it is no longer acceptable to say, “We think gay people shouldn’t be allowed to adopt because we hate gay people,” so they pretend it’s about the children.

    I wish I could follow the appeal proceedings. If someone points out to the DCF’s lawyers that their reasoning is faulty, they will dig in and say something like, “In DCF’s judgement, the blanket ban on adoption by gay parents is justified,” admitting without actually saying so that the adoptive parents are prima facie unfit simply because they are gay. I’d bet the ranch on it.

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