Who should and should not be able to Adopt Children
Who should and should not be able to Adopt Children
Is it right to tell a person or couple (who is a perfect candidate to be a parent) that they are not aloud to adopt because they have different sexual preferences than a majority of the world? Gay and lesbian couples should be aloud to adopt children; they are just as capable of being good parents as a heterosexual couple is. Thousands of children in this country are without permanent homes. These children suffer for months, to years, within state foster care systems that lack qualified foster parents and are frequently challenged with other problems. Is it right to let these children suffer when there are suitable homes out there for them? ‘We’ decided, as a society, that these homes are not suitable because ‘we’ think it is wrong to be gay. A majority of the world believes that gay parents would hurt the future and growing of a child; these are only ‘beliefs’ and ‘assumptions’ that our society makes.
Most states deny joint custody to gay and lesbian couples. Currently Florida is the only state in the nation with a statute prohibiting gays and lesbians from adopting children (although two states, Mississippi and Utah, recently barred same sex couples from adopting.) Yet, twenty-one states have granted second-parent adoptions to lesbian and gay couples and twenty-two states allow single gay and lesbians to adopt. Even the Department of Children and Families recognizes that gay and lesbians can make fine guardians for children and routinely places foster children in homosexual households. (Times p.1) So, what really would be the difference if we let gay or lesbian couples adopt a child jointly? Right now, there is a critical shortage of adoptive parents in the US; resulting in leaving many children without homes, while others are forced to stay in and out of a series of substandard foster homes. It is estimated that there are currently 500,000 children in foster care nationally. 100,000 of those children have to be adopted (Petit p.72), where in reality only about 20% of them actually get adopted. (Rivers p.1) Many of these children have traditionally been viewed as “unadoptable” because they are either not healthy, too old, or have another ethnic backgrounds than being Caucasian. In order to find more and well-suited parents, adoption and foster care policies have become more and more inclusive over the past two...