Florida Aims, Once Again, to Restrict Gay Adoptions

Florida struck down its gay-adoption ban in 2010, allowing plaintiff Martin Gill and his partner to keep their foster children. But a new bill is again targeting gay-adoption rights. (Photo: Joe Readle/Getty Images)

Florida has a long history of discrimination when it comes to allowing gays and lesbians to adopt children — and it was continued Thursday, when a panel in the House chamber advanced a bill that would allow adoption and foster-care agencies to discriminate based on their religious convictions.

The bill, filed by Rep. Jason Brodeur, would protect such agencies from lawsuits if they refuse to grant an adoption or fostering to a family because of their previously identified religious views.

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Because a Florida court ruled the state’s ban on gay adoptions unconstitutional five years ago, this latest bill appears to be largely symbolic. But, says Denise Brogan-Kator, senior legislative counsel for the national LGBT advocacy group Family Equality, “You never know with these things. You think that’s the case, and then it proceeds.” That was certainly the situation, she tells Yahoo Parenting, with a much-buzzed-about-bill that aims to ban transgender Floridians from using bathrooms that don’t match the gender of their birth, which passed a second House committee Tuesday.

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Florida has a history of anti-gay discrimination, Brogan-Kator explains, which dates back to the days of Anita Bryant — the former beauty-pageant queen and Florida orange-juice spokesperson who famously became a champion of the cause there, fighting against what she believed was gay “recruitment” of children. Her campaigning helped to usher in Florida’s banning of adoptions by LGBT people in 1977 — a law that was deemed unconstitutional by a Florida district court in 2010, when plaintiff Martin Gill and his partner won the right to adopt the boys they had fostered for years. “It’s a very good day for Florida; it’s a great day for children,” then-Gov. Charlie Crist said following the ruling. “Children deserve a loving home to be in.”

But the ban, though no longer enforced, has remained on the books (the House ruled last month to remove it, but the Senate must still follow). And that, says Brogan-Kator, has led some LGBT-rights advocates to worry it could be challenged yet again in the future, in another circuit court, eventually landing in the lap of the state’s highest court. “There’s a lot of concern about that, because we have a conservative Supreme Court in Florida,” she says.

Much of the issues surrounding LGBT adoption rights, however, could be irrelevant come June, when the Supreme Court is widely expected to rule in favor of national marriage equality. That’s because joint adoptions are restricted in many states if the couple isn’t married; marriage equality, then, would open the door to both same-sex marriage and adoption, everywhere. Several states — including Michigan, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas — either explicitly restrict gays and lesbians from joint adopting or have laws that are unclear.

Marriage equality would also solve the problem of stepparent adoption, which, in some states, restricts a same-sex stepparent from the right adopt without being married to the child’s original parent. That would leave what’s called second-parent adoption as the final frontier of gay adoption rights. This allows a “second” parent to adopt a child without the first parent (the birth mom of two moms, for example) losing any rights. Only 15 states currently allow LGBT parents to petition for a second-parent adoption. “It’s the least available,” Brogan-Kator says, “and most necessary for our community.”