Time Magazine On Gay Adoption

Time magazine covers the issue of same-sex couples adopting children, what they call gay adoption, this week. The article points out the growing acceptance of this practice and the momentum in state legislatures across the nation to make this clearly legal--up to this point most states had not addressed the issue, making same-sex adoption a veritable crap shoot than is subject to winding up in court.

But the gay adoption boom may be less about support for gay rights than it is about the urgency of finding homes for abandoned children. There are as many as 120,000 in the U.S. waiting to be adopted. After Congress ordered states in 1997 to move faster to find more families willing to take in these kids, "child-welfare organizations banded together to get legislatures to allow any qualified parent to adopt, irrespective of sexual orientation," says Rob Woronoff, gay and lesbian program director at the Child Welfare League of America in Washington. The movement got a boost in 2002 when the American Academy of Pediatrics said the "health, adjustment and development" of kids adopted by gay parents were no worse than those of kids placed with heterosexuals. By 2006, a Pew Center poll found, support of gay adoption had risen from 38% in 1999 to 46% and opposition had fallen from 57% to 48%.

While adopted children in gay and lesbian homes were scarce a couple of decades ago, they now number 65,000, or more than 4% of adopted children in the U.S., according to a new study by the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Washington's Urban Institute. Almost 2% of the nation's 3 million same-sex households include adopted children--and that growing pool, the UCLA study estimates, currently saves U.S. taxpayers as much as $130 million a year in costs for, say, keeping children in foster or institutional care and recruiting adoptive parents for them.

While adopted children in gay and lesbian homes were scarce a couple of decades ago, they now number 65,000, or more than 4% of adopted children in the U.S.

Can anyone tell me what the problem with this could be? Oh yeah, there's always the regressive folks at Focus on the (Straight) Family:

Bill Maier, Focus' vice president and chief psychologist, insists the practice "hurts children because it intentionally creates motherless or fatherless families," and he accuses child-welfare agencies of "a real biased push to normalize same-sex parenting." He adds, "I don't see any shortage of heterosexual parents willing to adopt."

Intentionally creates motherless or fatherless families? I believe that's already happened, Mr. Maier, that's why these kids need to be adopted! Are you stupid or just a bigot?

Don't see any shortage of heterosexual parents willing to adopt? If that's true, what's the deal with the 120,000 kids waiting to be adopted? Are they just waiting for a better offer or perhaps they like not having ANY parents, which Mr. Maier and his group believe is preferable to having two parents of the same sex.

The religious right likes to put civil rights up for a vote, why don't we let those 120,000 kids vote on which they would like, two mommies or two daddies vs. no mommies or no daddies.

Kids aren't stupid and they're less bigoted than grown ups, so I'm pretty sure how that vote would go.