No loving family for you kid
In 2003, as he introduced a bill to ban gay foster parenting, Texas legislator Robert Talton (R-Pasadena) told the state’s House of Representatives: "If it was me I would rather [leave] kids in orphanages as such—this is where they are now if they’re not fostered out. At least they have a chance of learning the proper values." (Texas doesn’t actually have orphanages, but you get the point.) Talton pushed a similar bill through his state’s House in April, though Talton’s language was later stripped from the Senate version of the law. Former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore used uncommonly vehement language, but perhaps not uncommon logic, when he wrote in 2000 that a lesbian mother should be denied custody of her three children because homosexuality was "an evil disfavored under the law," and that the state should "use its power to prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not encourage a criminal lifestyle."
"Among both the youngest and oldest cohorts," a 2003 study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found, "those who know someone who is gay are about twice as likely to favor gay marriage as those who do not.” The expansion of gay parenting means people who might not otherwise encounter gay couples will be more likely to see them at PTA meetings and Little League games. And the Harris poll found an overwhelming majority agrees that children being raised by gay couples should “have the same rights as all other children." For practical purposes, that means ensuring that their parents have rights too. If, other things being equal, it’s better for children to be raised by married couples, then as the number of kids raised by gays increases, the conservative case for expanding marriage rights becomes more potent. All of which means that as more same-sex couples raise children, opposition to gay marriage is likely to erode—a matter of concern to the social conservatives on whom Republican politicians increasingly rely for support.
The statistical evidence meshes with the experience of Adam Pertman, executive director of the Donaldson Institute, an adoption policy-research organization, and author of Adoption Nation. "The evidence on the ground, based on the markers that we have, is that these are good families," he says. "The social workers I talk to are asking how they can recruit more [gay parents], because they’re working. That’s the best validation I can think of, unless you think all these child welfare professionals are out to harm kids."
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