Florida judge tosses out ban on adoption by gays

MIAMI — A Florida law that has banned adoptions by gay men and lesbians for more than 30 years is unconstitutional, a Miami judge ruled Tuesday.

"The best interests of children are not preserved by prohibiting homosexual adoption," the judge, Cindy Lederman, of Miami-Dade Circuit Court, said in her decision. She said the law violated equal-protection rights for children and their prospective parents.

A spokeswoman for the Attorney General's Office said the state would appeal, and the case is likely to end up before the Florida Supreme Court.

Florida is the only state with a law prohibiting gay men and lesbians — couples and individuals — from adopting children. The Legislature voted to prohibit adoptions by gay men and lesbians in 1977, amid a campaign led by the entertainer Anita Bryant to repeal a gay-rights ordinance adopted by Dade County.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to the Florida law.

Some states, such as Mississippi and Utah, effectively bar adoptions by same-sex couples with laws against adoption by unmarried couples.

The ruling Tuesday will allow Frank Martin Gill, 47, a gay man from North Miami, to adopt two foster children he has raised since 2004.

Gill, has raised the children since they were brought to him by a state child-abuse investigator. The boys, identified only as John and James Doe, are 8 and 4.

"John and James left a world of chronic neglect, emotional impoverishment and deprivation to enter a new world, foreign to them, that was nurturing, safe, structured and stimulating," Lederman wrote. "They are a family, a good family, in every way except the eyes of the law."

Gill said in a news release from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which represented him: "Our family just got a lot more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving."

Robert Rosenwald, one of the lawyers who tried the case, said, "The case means that these two boys won't be torn from the only home that they've ever known." He heads the LGBT Advocacy Project of the ACLU of Florida.

The state presented experts who said that there was a higher incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among same-sex couples, that their relationships were less stable than those of heterosexuals and that the children of gay couples suffer a societal stigma.

But Gill's lawyers presented contradictory evidence, which Lederman found persuasive. "It is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person's ability to parent," she wrote.

Rosenwald called the decision a huge victory for gay and lesbian parents and for almost 1,000 children in Florida waiting to be adopted.

"The court for the first time after hearing all of the evidence determined that the scientific evidence is crystal-clear," he said. "There is no dispute that children raised by gay parents fare just as well or better than children raised by straight parents."

Advocates for traditional families blasted the opinion as judicial lawmaking and insisted the state law will stand. "In the short term, this is a tempest in a teapot," said Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. "In the long term, it will make no significant difference, because the courts will overturn this on appeal."

Florida is the only state that excludes all gay men and lesbians from adopting, though it allows gay and lesbian foster parents. Last month, voters in Arkansas passed a measure forbidding adoption by single people after a court dismissed a state rule excluding gay people from fostering children.

While praising Gill and his longtime partner as "wonderful foster parents," Neil Skene, a spokesman for the Department of Children & Families, said the agency will continue to defend the state law in search of "finality" on state adoption policy.

Information from The Miami Herald is included in this report.