Adoption forum to urge child welfare agencies to include gay families

SDGLN.com, november 29, 2011

WASHINGTON – Bryan Samuels, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families, will be joining the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), LGBT families and representatives from area child welfare agencies for an adoption forum on Wednesday, Nov. 30.

The forum will recognize the close of National Adoption Month and call on child welfare professionals to include LGBT families, year-round, in their efforts to expand the pool of families for foster youth.

A new video by the HRC Family Project on LGBT adoption will be premiered at the forum. The event will stream live at 10 am ET/7 am PT
Wednesday HERE.

HRC has celebrated adoptive families throughout National Adoption Month and is offering a wealth of resources related to adoption and other issues important to LGBT families HERE.

“As we end National Adoption Month, the work of finding permanent families for children and youth continues — it’s everyday work for child welfare professionals,” said Ellen Kahn, HRC Family Project Director and a professional social worker.

“Today we are recognizing several public agencies that have expanded their efforts to find families by reaching out to the LGBT community, a largely untapped resource. By partnering with HRC’s ACAF, these agencies have improved their practice with LGBT families and as a result are seeing an increase in foster and adoptive parents.”

This month, HRC issued All Children-All Families Seals of Recognition to Alameda County, Calif., and to the state of New Jersey’s Resource Family Division, which join Los Angeles County as the only public social services agencies to earn the seal for their success in implementing the ACAF policies and practices.

To read the complete article, go to: http://sdgln.com/news/2011/11/29/adoption-forum-urge-child-welfare-agencies-include-gay-families

in Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Same-sex couple denied high court review of adoption dispute

By Bill Mears, CNN Supreme Court Producer
Tue October 11, 2011

Washington (CNN) — A same-sex couple has been turned away at the Supreme Court in a cross-state dispute to have both of them officially listed as the parents of an adopted 5-year-old boy.

The justices rejected the California couple’s appeal Tuesday without comment. The couple claims that Louisiana, where the child was born, has an unconstitutional policy against adoption by unmarried partners. The state used that policy to justify naming only one of them on an amended birth certificate.

The men, Oren Adar and Mickey Ray Smith, argue gay couples have a due process right to be listed on such certificates as joint custodial parents. A federal appeals court ruled against the couple earlier this year.

Some civil rights groups had urged a high court review, saying the case would have broader implications in the current legal fight in state and federal courts over same-sex marriage and whether states — and Washington, D.C. — must honor legal rights that gays and lesbians enjoy in other states.

The men, who live in San Diego, legally adopted a 1 year-old boy from Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2006. The adoption was finalized in New York state, where the couple was then residing.

In their appeal, spearheaded by the gay rights advocacy group Lambda Legal, the couple said it was important both practically and symbolically they both be listed as the legal parents.

“Obtaining an amended birth certificate that accurately identifies both parents of an adopted child is vitally important for multiple purposes, including determining the parents’ and child’s right to make medical decisions for other family members at the necessary moments; determining custody, care, and support of the child in the event of a separation or divorce between the parents,” the legal brief said.

Lawyers for the men also said it is vitally necessary for Social Security and tax purposes, inheritance, insurance, school registration, and obtaining a passport.

Adar and Smith tried to have the birth certificate changed in Louisiana. All states have laws creating a right to accurate, amended official birth and identity documents that would be recognized in other states and by the federal government.

Darlene Smith, Louisiana’s registrar of vital records and statistics, refused their request. She took the position that the term “adoptive parents” in the applicable section of state law applies only to married parents, because in Louisiana, only married couples may jointly adopt a child.

Louisiana state officials argued they did not refuse to recognize the New York adoption decree, and had offered to list one of the parents on the official amended birth certificate. But Adar and Smith insisted both of them should be named.

In a statement, Lambda Legal said it was disappointed in the court’s discretion to stay out of the dispute. “This decision leaves adopted children and their parents vulnerable in their interactions with officials from other states,” said Kenneth Upton, a senior staff attorney with the group.

“More particularly, this decision leaves a child without an accurate birth certificate listing both his parents,” Upton added. “This issue now moves into the legislative arena. We need to push for a change in Louisiana state policy in order to stabilize and standardize respect for parent-child relationships for all adoptive children.”

The 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in April that Adar and Smith could not file a federal civil rights claim under the Constitution’s “full faith and credit” clause. That refers to Article IV, Section 1, which says states must respect the “public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.”

The full 16-member court, in an 11-5 ruling, concluded the clause applies only to court actions, not those of state legislators or executive officials, and added that “there is no legal basis on which to conclude that failure to issue a revised birth certificate denies ‘recognition’ to the New York adoption decree.”

More importantly, the court said states have the power to make their own decisions about issuing birth certificates.

“Adoption is not a fundamental right,” said the appeals court, citing studies that found marriage provides a more stable environment in which to raise children.

“Louisiana has a legitimate interest in encouraging a stable and nurturing environment for the education and socialization of its adopted children. … Louisiana may rationally conclude that having parenthood focused on a married couple or single individual — not on the freely severable relationship of unmarried partners — furthers the interests of adopted children.”

Tuesday’s decision by the justices not to intervene is the final legal defeat for Adar and Smith on the certificate question, but does not affect their continuing custody of the boy.

in Adoption / Legal / Parenting  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

New Numbers, and Geography, for Gay Couples

By SABRINA TAVERNISE – New York Times – August 25, 2011

REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. — So much for San Francisco.

The list of top cities for same-sex couples as a portion of the population does not include that traditional gay mecca, according to new census data. In fact, the city, which ranked third in 1990 and 11th in 2000, plummeted to No. 28 in 2010. And West Hollywood, once No. 1, has dropped out of the top five.

The Census Bureau data, finalized this week and analyzed by Gary Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, gives the clearest picture to date of same-sex couples in America. In absolute numbers, they jumped by half in the past decade, to 901,997.

Most surprising is how far same-sex couples have dispersed, moving from traditional enclaves and safe havens into farther-flung areas of the country.

Consider, for example, the upstarts on the list: Pleasant Ridge, Mich., a suburb of Detroit; New Hope, Pa.; and this beach town in southern Delaware. All three have been popular destinations for gay people locally but had never ranked in the top 10.

The No. 1-ranked town is Provincetown, Mass., at the tip of Cape Cod.

The reordering reflects a growing influence of baby boomers, who became adults in the 1960s and 1970s, when the social stigma was starting to ease, and are more willing than previous generations to stand up and be counted, Mr. Gates said.

Now that generation, arguably the first in history with such a large contingent that is out, is beginning to retire, and its life transition is showing up in the data, with older cities as the new popular choices.

“As the baby boomer generation ages into retirement,” Mr. Gates said, “we see its impact really strongly in the geography.”

The pattern was in evidence in Rehoboth Beach, a family resort town of 1,300, which was fourth on the list of same-sex couples per capita and did not figure in the top 10 rankings in 1990 or 2000.

“The change was pretty dramatic,” said Rick McReynolds, 58, a resident. “It used to be all these boys,” but now, he said, the gay population in town is older and has less of a singles scene.

But people who used to party here, like Bob Moore, a retired communications professor from Pennsylvania, have since returned with their partners to live. Mr. Moore, who came out in his 40s, after two children and a divorce, said he and his partner were looking for a place that was gay friendly, but not an exclusive enclave.

“We liked the fact that it was gay without being the Castro” neighborhood of San Francisco, said Mr. Moore, 59, who was sitting with his partner, Steve Ortleib, in Rigby’s Bar and Grill on Tuesday night.

He said they had visited four top retirement destinations for same-sex couples — two in California and two in Florida — before settling on Rehoboth.

In interviews in San Francisco on Tuesday, several gay people said the city attracted people who did not always want to become part of a couple. The census does not ask about sexual orientation.

“You settle down in small towns because there is not much to choose from,” said Nick Meinzer, 41, a hairstylist who works on Castro Street. “In urban areas we wait longer to settle down. I’ve been single for two years. They’re not counting those of us who are single.”

Of the top cities like Pleasant Ridge, Mr. Meinzer said: “I’ve never even heard of those places. You’d think if they were so great you’d have heard of them.”

Dennis Ziebell, 61, the owner of Orphan Andy’s, a Castro neighborhood diner he opened 35 years ago, said he did not believe the count was accurate. “Take another survey, that’s all I can say,” he said. “I’ve been in a relationship for 36 years and nobody from the census asked me about it.”

Last year was the third time the Census Bureau counted same-sex couples. The count included people of the same sex in the same household who said they were spouses or unmarried partners (spouses were not included in 1990). Mr. Gates calculated how many same-sex couples there were for every 1,000 households within towns and cities across the country.

New York is too big to figure prominently in top city rankings for same-sex couples per capita (it was 67th in 2010, Mr. Gates said), but it does rank by county, alongside more the more traditional locations. Manhattan is No. 5, after San Francisco County, Hampshire County, Mass., Monroe County, Fla., and Multnomah County, Ore.

The city ranking is a barometer of the changing demographics among the population of same sex couples, which has grown more diffuse throughout the country over the past 20 years.

In interviews here this week, several couples said that social attitudes had softened overt time and that living farther afield was now easier to do. Mr. Gates compared the phenomenon to immigrants who no longer sought the safety of an enclave.

Steve Elkins, who runs a nonprofit community center called Camp Rehoboth, which acts as a liaison with the gay community, said cultural training classes for the summer police force would be met by stony stares in the early days. More recently, when he asked the police officers if they knew a gay person, two people in the class raised their hands to say they were gay.

“It’s a generational change in thoughts and attitudes,” he said. Rehoboth, he likes to say, used to be an island of tolerance in a sea of homophobia, and now is an island of tolerance in a sea of outlet malls.

Further evidence, Mr. Elkins said, was the quick passage of a civil unions bill that is set to take effect in Delaware on Jan. 1.

TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE, GO TO: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/us/25census.html

in Adoption / IVF / Parenting / Second Parent Adoption / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Who’s on the Family Tree? Now It’s Complicated

July 4, 2011 – New York Times –
By LAURA M. HOLSON

Laura Ashmore and Jennifer Williams are sisters. After that, their relationship becomes more complex.

When Ms. Ashmore and her husband, Lee, learned a few years ago that they could not conceive a child, Ms. Williams stepped in and offered to become pregnant with a donor’s sperm on behalf of the couple, and give birth to the child. The baby, Mallory, was born in September 2007 and adopted by Ms. Ashmore and her husband.

Then the sisters began to ponder: where would the little girl sit on the family tree?

“For medical purposes I am her mother,” Ms. Williams said. “But I am also her aunt.”

Many families are grappling with similar questions as a family tree today is beginning to look more like a tangled forest. Genealogists have long defined familial relations along bloodlines or marriage. But as the composition of families changes, so too has the notion of who gets a branch on the family tree.

Some families now organize their family tree into two separate histories: genetic and emotional. Some schools, where charting family history has traditionally been a classroom project, are now skipping the exercise altogether.

Adriana Murphy, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at the Green Acres School in Rockville, Md., said she asked students to write a story about an aspect of their family history instead. At Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, KC Cohen, a counselor, said the family tree had been mostly relegated to foreign language class, where students can practice saying “brother” or “sister” in French and Spanish.

“You have to be ready to have that conversation about surrogates, sperm donors and same-sex parents if you are going to teach the family tree in the classroom,” Ms. Cohen said.

For the last six years, according to United States census data, there have been more unmarried households than married ones. And more same-sex couples are having children using surrogates or sperm donors or by adoption. The California Cryobank, one of the nation’s largest sperm banks, said that about one-third of its clients in 2009 were lesbian couples, compared with 7 percent a decade earlier. Even birth certificate reporting is catching up. New questions are being phased in nationally on the standard birth certificate questionnaire about whether, and what type of, reproductive technology was used, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Tracing a family tree, though, is more than just an intellectual exercise. There are medical and legal implications, particularly when it comes to death and inheritance. Families, said Melinde Lutz Byrne, president of the American Society of Genealogists, are mostly concerned with who inherits property when a biological relative dies.

Ms. Williams and her sister, though, had other issues to resolve. Ms. Williams, who has a lesbian partner, had a biological child, Jamison, 6, who was conceived through a sperm donor, too. And the sisters wondered how to describe the relationship between Mallory and Jamison, who are not only biological half-siblings, but also cousins. And where did the sperm donors fit in?

After months of discussion, they came to a resolution: “Mallory is my daughter and Jennifer is her aunt,” said Ms. Ashmore, 38, who lives close to her sister near Minneapolis. At home, Jamison sometimes refers to Mallory as his sister. But at school, said Ms. Williams, 40, “she’s his cousin.” The sperm donors, they agreed, had no place on the family tree.

For some children, having to explain their family tree can be alienating.

“It can cause kids pain in unexpected ways,” said Peggy Gillespie, a founder of Family Diversity Projects, a family education advisory group.

At Green Acres last year, Ms. Murphy said, two kindergartners were playing outside when a boy, the son of a single mother, told a classmate that he had an older sister. “You can’t have an older sister; you don’t have a dad,” Ms. Murphy recalled the girl saying. The boy protested; he said he knew his sperm donor, who had a daughter of his own.

Sue Stuever Battel and Bob Battel of Cass City, Mich., will soon have four children. The oldest, Addy, 8, was conceived naturally; Dori, 5, was conceived via a sperm donor. They are adopting two toddler boys. “All four of our kids are 100 percent in our family tree,” Ms. Battel said. “The genetic connection has never mattered.”

But the Battels understand that their children may have questions. So they have prepared two sets of baby books: one outlining life with the Battels, the other about each child’s birth parents. The children can choose which details they want to share.

Ms. Battel and her husband also debated whether to include other children born using their donor’s sperm. After all, those children would be biological half-siblings to Dori. Their verdict: “We decided they are not half-siblings, but donor siblings,” Ms. Battel said. “We honor them, but they are not part of the family.”

Jeannette Lofas, founder of Stepfamily Foundation, a family counseling service based in New York City, eschews the traditional family tree for a network of circles (females) and squares (males), with dotted and straight lines to connect married and blood relatives. A live-in lover or nanny can be included, too, though with no connecting lines.

“That is how complex we have to think,” Ms. Lofas said.

Rob Okun, a 61-year-old magazine editor from Massachusetts, agreed to donate his sperm to a lesbian couple 16 years ago. Mr. Okun already had two biological children with a longtime female partner and two stepchildren with his current wife. He wanted no role in parenting the children born with his donated sperm, but did want them to know who he was.

The couple, Patricia Kogut and Lynne Dahlborg, agreed, and Ms. Kogut gave birth to Lucyna and Nathaniel. Ms. Dahlborg then adopted both children.

“There is the family tree and there is the day-to-day structure of the family,” Ms. Kogut said.

She described the family as having a “triple family tree” that included her, Ms. Dahlborg and Mr. Okun.

For a long time, though, Mr. Okun was uncomfortable with the connection, largely because his mother disapproved. It wasn’t until after her death in 2004 that he considered including the children in his tree. Now, he said, “I make no distinction between my biological and stepchildren.”

For now, Ms. Williams and her sister said they were happy that Mallory and Jamison shared a special bond. But what if one day the two children want to place themselves as brother and sister on their family tree?

“I think I’m fine,” Ms. Ashmore said, tentatively.

Then she added, “But we’ll have to think about it.”

in Adoption / Anonymous/Known Donation / IVF / Legal / Parenting / Second Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Adoptions by Gay Couples Rise, Despite Barriers

June 13, 2011 – New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Growing numbers of gay couples across the country are adopting, according to census data, despite an uneven legal landscape that can leave their children without the rights and protections extended to children of heterosexual parents.

Same-sex couples are explicitly prohibited from adopting in only two states — Utah and Mississippi — but they face significant legal hurdles in about half of all other states, particularly because they cannot legally marry in those states.

Despite this legal patchwork, the percentage of same-sex parents with adopted children has risen sharply. About 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child in the house in 2009, up from just 8 percent in 2000, according to Gary Gates, a demographer at the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The trend line is absolutely straight up,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit organization working to change adoption policy and practice. “It’s now a reality on the ground.”

That reality has been shaped by what advocates for gay families say are two distinct trends: the need for homes for children currently waiting for adoption — now about 115,000 in the United States — and the increased acceptance of gays and lesbians in American society.

The American family does not look the same as it did 30 years ago, they argue, and the law has just been slow to catch up.

Most of the legal obstacles facing gay couples intending to adopt stem from prohibitions on marriage, according to the Family Equality Council, an advocacy group for gay families. In most states, gay singles are permitted to adopt.

Though advocates for gay families can point to legal victories — court rulings in Florida last year and in Arkansas in April — they note that they are tempered by losses, such as in Arizona, which passed a law recently requiring social workers to give preference to married heterosexual couples.

“It’s two steps forward, one step back,” said Ellen Kahn, director of the Family Project at the Human Rights Campaign, a resource for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender families and the agencies that work with them.

But laws and politics aside, advocates say that more adoption agencies and social workers are seeing same-sex couples as a badly needed resource for children in government care.

“The reality is we really need foster and adoptive parents, and it doesn’t matter what the relationship is,” said Moira Weir, director of the job and family services department in Hamilton County, Ohio. “If they can provide a safe and loving home for a child, isn’t that what we want?”

The Obama administration has noted the bigger role that gays and lesbians can play in adoptions. The commissioner for the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Bryan Samuels, sent a memo to that effect to national child welfare agencies in April.

“The child welfare system has come to understand that placing a child in a gay or lesbian family is no greater risk than placing them in a heterosexual family,” Mr. Samuels said in an interview.

The numbers are small. Mr. Gates estimates that 65,000 adopted children live in homes in which the head of the household is gay, or about 4 percent of the adopted population.

Ms. Kahn, who trains adoption agencies to work with gay and lesbian prospective parents, said that the number of agencies she works with has more than doubled over the past five years to about 50.

She added that discrimination still remains and that in some conservative states, adoption agencies that serve gay families function like an “underground railroad.”

But adoptions are happening anyway, even in places where the law does not give both parents full rights. Matt and Ray Lees, a couple in Worthington, Ohio, said they were selected as parents for a 7-month-old, ahead of several heterosexual couples, in part because they had successfully adopted two older children.

Social workers conducted detailed background checks on both of them, but under Ohio law, they must be married to adopt jointly, so when the legal adoption process began, only one could participate. (Same-sex marriage is illegal in Ohio.)

The Leeses took turns. Ray adopted three — two who were originally from Haiti and a baby — and Matt is completing an adoption of five siblings whose drug-addicted mother could not care for them.

“When we first considered it, we thought, people are going to think we are crazy for having eight kids,” said Matt Lees, 39. But they did not want to split the siblings and after careful thought, decided to take them.

“It was the best way we could think of spending the next 20 years of our lives,” he said.

They bind their two legally distinct families together with custody agreements. They do not provide full parental rights, however, because like many states, Ohio does not allow second-parent adoptions by unmarried couples unless the first parent renounces his or her right to the child. They have to maintain two family health insurance policies.

Same-sex parents who adopt tend to be more affluent and educated than the larger population of same-sex parents, according to Mr. Gates.

Matt and Ray Lees both have college degrees and white-collar jobs at Nationwide, an insurance company based in Columbus.

It was hard for them as two fathers at first. Their eldest daughter, 6 at the time, cried and asked who would cook and do her hair. But those days are long past. And though the family is a curiosity in their neighborhood — two white men driving eight black children in a large Mercedes minivan — they are not alone. There are at least two other gay families raising adopted children nearby.

Adoption has not attracted the kind of attention nationally that gay marriage has. Advocates say they like it that way. The more it is in the public eye, the greater the chances conservative legislatures will try to block it, they add.

But conservative groups say the fight is weighted in favor of gay people because courts tend to side with them in rulings. Indeed, a court in Durham County, N.C., had been quietly approving second-parent adoptions that were not formally allowed by statute, until a State Supreme Court ruling stopped it in December.

And the expansion of civil union laws has caused some religious-based charities to stop or modify operations in cities and states where they have passed, including in Illinois this month, where several charities have temporarily suspended new parent applications.

Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council, a conservative advocacy group, said the goal of advocates of adoption by same-sex couples was “to silence people like me.”

Mr. Pertman believes the trend of rising adoption is irreversible.

“The war has been won, but the battles are still being fought,” he said.

in Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Adoption bill is signed into law

Married couples will have preference when it comes to adopting children under a new measure signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer on Monday.

Senate Bill 1188, which was sponsored by Sen. Linda Gray, R-Glendale, would require an adoption agency to give primary consideration to adoptive placement with a married man and woman, with all other criteria being equal.

Agencies are also supposed to consider other factors, including possible placement with relatives, or the wishes of children 12 or older, the law says.

The measure applies to both state-funded and private adoption agencies.

Previously, only Utah had a law requiring priority for married couples, although several other states have bans on adoptions by same-sex couples or by unmarried couples.

Conservative groups and other supporters of the measure said children should have every opportunity to grow up in a household with a mother and father.

But critics said the measure would discourage singles from considering adoption in Arizona.

Tom Mann, chairman of the board for Equality Arizona, a group that supports gay rights, criticized the governor for failing to “demonstrate real leadership.”

“The governor’s action today is harmful to children in foster care and group homes who are seeking a permanent home and the support of a loving, caring family,” Mann said.

But Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy and a strong advocate of SB 1188, said Monday that the bill was among those that dealt with “critical issues of life, marriage and religious liberty,” and that she was “grateful” for the governor’s support.

The bill goes into effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns its current session, which is expected as early as today.

Republic reporter Mary K. Reinhart contributed to this article.

in Adoption / Legal / Legislation  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Same-sex adoptions lose ground after Va. board vote

Washington Post – 4.20.11

By Anita Kumar

RICHMOND — The State Board of Social Services has voted overwhelmingly against new adoption rules that some say would allow same-sex couples to adopt in the state for the first time.

In a 7-2 vote Wednesday afternoon, the board opted against the new rules, first proposed by former governor Tim Kaine. In Virginia, only married couples and single men and women, regardless of sexual orientation, can adopt. The proposed changes would require private and faith-based groups, such as Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services, to allow gay parents to adopt or foster children.

Some members of the board, including Democratic appointees who make up the 5-4 majority, had told The Washington Post on Tuesday they would be guided by advice from Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II. He said in a memo last week that the proposed new adoption rules would violate state law.

Cuccinelli’s position reverses a 2009 decision made by his predecessor, William C. Mims, a former Republican legislator and now a Virginia Supreme Court justice. Mims did not return messages Tuesday.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell had also opposed the proposed regulations.

Board chairwoman Bela Sood, who was appointed by former Democratic governors Kaine and Mark R. Warner, said that despite members’ philosophical disagreements, they had to rely on the attorney general’s views. “We have to depend on them,” she said. “They are very clear and direct.”

The proposed regulations would protect against discrimination on the basis of gender, age, religion, political beliefs, sexual orientation, disability, family status, race, color or national origin.

Gay rights and adoption advocacy groups have been pressuring McDonnell and the board — writing them, taking out ads and holding news conferences — to approve the regulations.

“No person who wants to become a parent should be forced to leave the state to do so, and no child should be denied a loving home because of such discrimination,” James Parrish, executive director of Equality Virginia. told the Post on Tuesday.

By Anita Kumar  |  05:45 PM ET, 04/20/2011

in Adoption / In the News / Legal / Legislation  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

McDonnell weighs proposal that would allow gays to adopt

By Anita Kumar, Monday, April , 8:38 PM Washington Post

RICHMOND — Republican Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is considering whether to try to derail proposed regulations developed by his Democratic predecessor that would for the first time allow gay couples to adopt children in Virginia.

McDonnell has less than two weeks to act on the regulations that would force state-licensed private and church-run agencies to allow unmarried couples — heterosexual or homosexual — to adopt children.

Conservatives, including Del. Robert G. Marshall (R-Prince William), are lobbying McDonnell to ask the State Board of Social Services to kill the proposal because they do not think it is healthy for gay couples to raise children.

Marshall said that he considers the change part of a “radical anti-family proposal” and that he does not even think single people should adopt, which is currently allowed by law. “Children need a mother and a father,” he said.

Eric Finkbeiner, McDonnell’s policy director, said that the governor was considering his options but in general “supports and encourages” adoption of children by married couples and single parents.

McDonnell alienated gay rights activists shortly after taking office when he excluded sexual orientation from an executive order that barred discrimination in the state workforce, a break in tradition from his Democratic predecessors.

Later, when Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II advised the state’s public colleges to rescind policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, McDonnell further angered gay rights activists when, in an attempt to quell the matter, he issued a nonbinding “executive directive” prohibiting discrimination in the state workforce, including on the basis of sexual orientation.

McDonnell must make his recommendation to the State Board of Social Services, a nine-member panel in which all but four members are holdovers from his Democratic predecessor, by April 16.

The social services board has spent more than a year working on developing regulations. It received more than 1,000 responses during a public comment period, which ended Friday.

If the board approves a significantly changed regulation, 25 people could ask that the public comment period be reopened and implementation be delayed.

Kaine, who is expected to run for U.S. Senate next year, proposed the change to the regulations in November 2009, less than two months before he left the office to become the full-time chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Currently, only married couple and single men and women — regardless of sexual orientation — can adopt in Virginia. The proposal, according to the governor’s office, would mandate that gay singles and unmarried couples be able to access faith-based groups, such as Catholic Charities and Jewish Family Services, to adopt children.

Claire Guthrie Gastanaga, general counsel to Equality Virginia and a former chief deputy attorney general, disputed that the proposed regulations would not allow unmarried couples to adopt. “They’re trying to create problems where none exist,” she said.

Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, said she contacted the governor’s office and is confident that the administration plans to recommend the removal of the language.

Cobb said her organization, which is against gay couples adopting children, opposes the regulations more strongly on the basis of religious freedom. She said private adoption agencies deserve to have the ability to screen prospective parents based on the agency’s beliefs.

Jeff Caruso, executive director of the Virginia Catholic Conference, the public policy arm of the state’s Catholic dioceses, said his organization also opposes the new regulations on the basis of religious freedom.

“Faith-based agencies have certain deeply held convictions,” he said. He said it’s important to preserve freedom of conscience.

Marshall said he notified the governor’s office last week when he first heard about the proposal. Finkbeiner said the administration has known about the regulations for the past year but waited to act because the governor generally weighs in after the public comment ends.

Marshall said he also asked Cuccinelli for an opinion on the matter Friday but had not heard back.

in Adoption / In the News / Legal / Legislation  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Arkansas court skeptical of reasons for banning unmarried couples from adopting or fostering children

Thursday, March 17, 2011 – Nancy Polikoff –
Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage

It’s always risky to predict the outcome of a case based on oral argument. Nonetheless, I’ll predict that the Arkansas Supreme Court will affirm the decision of a trial judge in Cole v. Arkansas Dept. of Human Services that the state’s ban on adoption and fostering by anyone living with a nonmarital partner violates the state’s constitution. The ban was enacted by voters in 2008. You can watch the argument on the court’s website here. Although a lawyer for the state did argue briefly, the lawyer who primarily argued for upholding the ban represented the intervenors, the Family Council Action Committee, the Arkansas group behind placing the matter on the ballot in 2008. The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU, which has once again done a top notch job.

Before the US Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that its criminal prohibition on private consensual sex in the home violated the state’s constitution. The importance of that case, Jegley v. Picado, played a large role in today’s hearing. The trial court found the ban a violation of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights as articulated in Jegley. The appellants disagree, arguing that the ban is nothing like the intrusion of criminalizing behavior in the home. The justices did not appear to buy it. They repeatedly returned to the fundamental right articulated in Jegley and expressed skepticism that the ban was anything but a direct and substantial burden on the exercise of that right.

If the ban violates the fundamental right of the plaintiffs then it cannot stand unless it is narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest. But if there is no fundamental right at stake, then the ban survives as long as it has a “rational basis.” The intervenors and the state argued that the rational basis test allows the generalization that, as a group, the homes of “cohabiting” couples are less stable and more volatile than other homes, and that therefore an individual review of each applicant in such a situation is not required, even though some of those homes would be suitable.

When one of the justices asked the lawyer for the intervenors if he conceded he would lose if the court applied “heightened scrutiny,” he said no. He said the “life” of the child was at stake (that’s how he characterized the state’s interest on several occasions) and that the state couldn’t be required to place children in the “riskiest” and “poorest performing” home environments.

In what was perhaps the most astonishing part of the argument by the appellants, both lawyers asserted that the state’s screening process is not good enough to weed out unsuitable applicants. They called the process “imperfect” and “not foolproof” and said that mistakes are made. When one of the justices responded that the lawyer for the agency was acknowledging his system to be a failure, the lawyer said the Department of Human Services was doing the best it could but that people lie and “slip through” their process. He later backpedaled and said he had misspoken, but in the process he asserted the problem was everywhere and that caseworkers are overworked and the agency does not have sufficient funding.

So this is what it’s come to. There is no response to the assertion of the plaintiffs, echoed by judges on the court, that no one is allowed to foster or adopt a child without first going through an agency or judicial approval process. So apparently to justify excluding an entire category of applicants from the opportunity to show that a placement in their home is in the best interest of a child, the government lawyer must argue that his agency is not capable of doing its job properly. I find it impossible to imagine that the Arkansas Supreme Court will base its decision on such reasoning.

The lawyers for the plaintiffs reiterated the individual process each applicant goes through. He said that any studies about groups of children are irrelevant because of that, but he did further argue that whatever correlation there may be between “cohabitation” and child outcome does not demonstrate that the cohabitation causes the problems. He also told that court that it could not rule against the gay and lesbian plaintiffs without overruling the court’s decision in Howard. In that case a unanimous court struck down an administrative regulation preventing a gay person or anyone living with a gay person from being licensed as a foster parent. The authors of both the majority and concurring opinions in Howard remain on the bench.

One of the court’s newest justices, Courtney Hudson Henry, asked the lawyer for the intervenors the last question of the argument. She noted that a gay person living alone with multiple sexual partners is eligible to adopt, as long as that person doesn’t live with a partner. (I wish she has left the qualifier “gay” off her statement, as it is true for a heterosexual with multiple partners as well). The response she received was that the ban is concerned with the dynamics and volatility of cohabiting relationships and break ups and there are a variety of reasons an individual might be denied the ability to adopt or be a foster parent.

And so it has come to this. The same state that cannot be trusted be weed out cohabiting couples whose homes are not good for children can be trusted to weed out single applicants who sleep around (without having police go snooping in their homes, which everyone agrees Jegley does not allow). Of course, that’s not the point. In fact, the point of the ban has nothing to do with children and everything to do with stigmatizing both same-sex and unmarried different-sex relationships. I don’t think the Arkansas Supreme Court is buying it.

in Adoption / Foster Care / Foster Parenting / In the News / Legal  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Federal Court to Re-Hear Same-Sex Couple’s Challenge After Louisiana Refuses to Respect Out-of-State Adoptions

 Lambda Legal, January 14, 2011

Five-year-old son raised by two fathers still without accurate birth certificate.

(New Orleans, January 14, 2011) – The full 16-member U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments on Wednesday, January 19, 2011, regarding the New York adoption of a Louisiana-born baby boy by a same-sex couple.

Lambda Legal represents Oren Adar and Mickey Smith in their case against Louisiana State Registrar Darlene Smith. Adar and Smith are a gay couple who adopted their Louisiana-born son in 2006 in New York, where a judge issued an adoption decree. When the couple attempted to get a new birth certificate for their child, in part so Smith could add his son to his health insurance, the registrar’s office told him that Louisiana does not recognize adoption by unmarried parents and so could not issue it.

Lambda Legal filed suit on behalf of Adar and Smith in October 2007, saying that the registrar was violating the Full Faith and Credit Clause and Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution by refusing to recognize the New York adoption judgment because the child’s parents are unmarried.  The Constitution requires that judgments and orders issued by a court in one state be legally binding in other states. Further, a state may not disadvantage some children over others simply because the child’s parents are unmarried. The Louisiana attorney general disagreed, and advised the registrar that she did not have to honor an adoption from another state that would not have been granted under Louisiana law had the couple lived and adopted there. In 2009, U.S. District Judge Jay Zainey ruled against the registrar and issued a summary judgment ordering her to issue a new birth certificate identifying both Oren Adar and Mickey Smith as the boy’s parents, saying her continued failure to do so violated the U.S. Constitution. In 2010, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and affirmed the judgment. The attorney general requested a rehearing by the full Court of Appeals, which was granted.

WHO:          Kenneth Upton Jr., Supervising Senior Staff Attorney for Lambda Legal

WHAT:        Oral Arguments, Adar v. Smith

WHERE:          John Minor Wisdom U.S. Court of Appeals Building
                600 Camp St.
                New Orleans, Louisiana

WHEN:        Wednesday, January 19, 2011
                9:00 a.m.

in Adoption / In the News / Legal / Second Parent Adoption  by Anthony Brown 0 comments