IGF CultureWatch

There’s been surprisingly little furor over the Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision this week to overturn a voter-passed initiative that prohibited unmarried couples from adopting or foster parenting children.  Fifty-seven percent of state voters approved the measure, and in a unanimous decision, the court said it violated the state constitution.

The opinion isn’t about same-sex marriage, exactly, and it isn’t a case holding that lesbians and gay men are entitled to equal treatment.  That may have tempered the acrimony and excitability that normally occurs at this stage of the kabuki.

But the opinion does overturn the will of the voters, which is the standard touchstone in these cases – at least where same-sex couples are involved.  Where are the calls for judicial impeachment?

Arkansas’s Act 1 only prohibits adoption or foster parenting to people who are cohabiting with a sexual partner outside of a lawfully recognized Arkansas marriage.  So, by its terms, it doesn’t single out homosexuals. There is a very good discussion at Eugene Volokh’s site about whether a headline saying “Ark. Court strikes down law barring gay adoptions” is accurate or not.  But there certainly wasn’t any doubt in the mind of Arkansans what and who the law was really about.  There doesn’t seem to have been much concern in the voter’s minds about heterosexual unmarried couples, who could, after all, get themselves lawfully hitched if they wanted to adopt a child.

The court’s reasoning turns on a simple question: Can any unmarried, sexually active partners serve as foster or adoptive parents in a way that would be in the best interest of a child?  The Act makes a blanket determination that non-marital sexual activity overrides the normal determination in these cases of a child’s best interest, and the court ruled that this made the law overbroad.  The Arkansas Constitution guarantees the state’s citizens freedom from governmental intrusion into adult, consensual, private sexual decisions, and laws that abrogate that freedom have to be very narrowly tailored or else they will be unconstitutional.

State law already allows courts to determine whether any particular couple, cohabiting or married (or any single person, for that matter), would serve a child’s best interest.  The Act’s wholesale elimination of one entire category of such potential parents puts any good parents in the excluded category to the choice of giving up their partner or their wish to adopt.  The court is quite savvy in noting that the state couldn’t really enforce any middle ground of making sure unmarried partners aren’t having sex.  That, after all, is the common sense underpinning of a constitutional right to sexual privacy – Bedroom Policing is beyond even the furthest limits of any legitimate government or any legitimate police force.

The unanimous opinion, while not pro-gay, rests on the same foundation that all civil rights movements rely on.  There may be – are – some same-sex couples who would not make good parents.  It is unlikely, I’d think, that many of them would go through what Arkansas requires to adopt a child, but it’s possible.  Existing law, though, provides for that by making courts determine whether any particular couple’s parenting potential would be in a particular child’s best interest.  No couple’s ability is prejudged, no child’s best interests decided by default.

Anything less is discrimination – judging someone based on other than their own merits.  That is really all lesbians and gay men are asking for.  The highest court in Arkansas read that state’s constitution as giving them — and the children they may want to raise — that chance.