WASHINGTON (ABP) — The Supreme Court has declined, without comment, to hear a challenge to Florida's ban on adoptions by homosexuals.
Returning to the bench from their month-long winter break Jan. 10, the justices turned away an appeal in Lofton vs. Secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families. The denial means a ruling last year by a federal appeals court upholding the law will stand.
The law, enacted in 1977 at the height of performer Anita Bryant's highly publicized anti-gay campaign in the state, is unique in the nation. It categorically excludes gays from the ability to adopt.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a challenge to the law in 1999 on behalf of four gay Florida residents who served as foster parents but could not adopt their children permanently due to the ban. ACLU attorneys argued that the law contradicted a 1996 Supreme Court opinion that said laws adopted out of anti-gay bias were unconstitutional.
The high court reinforced the logic behind that ruling in 2003, declaring anti-sodomy laws targeting gays unconstitutional.
Nonetheless, a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Florida gay-adoption ban last year. In July, that court's full panel deadlocked, 6-6, on whether to re-hear the case. The tie meant they would not reconsider the case.
Attorneys for Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) argued the state had a right to encourage healthy development of children — especially foster children, who may come from troubled backgrounds — by placing them in traditional two-parent homes.
“It is rational to believe that children need male and female influences to develop optimally, particularly in the areas of sexual and gender identity, and heterosexual role modeling,” state attorneys argued in one filing for the case.
But ACLU official Matt Coles noted that Florida currently allows heterosexual singles and divorcees to adopt. It even allows adoption for people who have been cited for abusing their children before, he said.
Coles, director of the group's Gay and Lesbian Rights Project, said the real losers in the Supreme Court's decision are foster children in Florida who need adoption.
“If you talk to kids who are in foster care — real little kids who are 4, 5, 6 years old — they understand the difference between being foster kids and being adopted,” he said. “When we filed this case in 1999, Florida had 3,500 more kids than it had prospective adoptive parents. That number is now 8,000.”
In a more recent ruling affecting foster care in Arkansas, a judge ruled Dec. 29 that the state's child-welfare board exceeded its authority by instituting a policy banning placement of foster children in any household that includes a gay adult. In his ruling, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Timothy Fox noted that the state had shown no evidence that children do better when raised in households with traditional heterosexual married couples than with gay parents.