USA Today looks at the growing efforts to ban gays and lesbians from adopting children, which it labels "a second front in the culture wars" over same-sex marriage. Steps to pass laws or secure November ballot initiatives are underway in at least 16 states.
It could be that before too long, gays-especially couples-who are able to do so, really will have to relocate themselves to those states that don't trample them underfoot.
Reason Online responds, primarily by referencing Julian
Sanchez's Reason magazine article on the
growing fight. Sanchez suggests that opponents of gay
adoption:
...visit Florida and ask a child in foster care which makes him feel more threatened: the thought of being raised by homosexuals, or the prospect of an indefinite number of years spent passing through an indefinite number of homes.
One of the Reason blog's readers disputes that the kids would
choose the gay parents (I guess some probably wouldn't, depending
on whether they're old enough to have imbibed schoolyard
homophobia). Another reader paraphrases libertarian humorist P.J.
O'Rourke along the lines of:
I am such an extreme Republican that I support gay marriage and adoption. If gay people get married and raise kids, pretty soon they'll be living in suburbs, driving SUV's and voting Republican.
Well, in another universe where Republicans where true to their
own best values, maybe.