First the good news:
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 overall numbers are still relatively small. The Times piece reports that the 65,000 adopted kids living in gay-headed households account for 4% of the total. But the point is that (a) kids who need love and care are gettng it, and (b) in another “both sides are not the same moment” there is increasing recognition of and support for, essentially, the ordinariness of same-sex families, up to and including from the administration of that known enemy of teh gay, President Obama:
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 bad news: in many states, same sex households are still the families that dare not speak their names. Arizona, for example, continuing its campaign to supplant Mississippi as the most benighted state in the union, set into law a principle of discrimination against same sex adoptive parents.
More generally, bars to same-sex marriage produce obligate single-parented children. Why?