Word: adoption
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...also means a lot to the bill's opponents, who fear that legalizing gay partners' parenthood is tantamount to legitimizing their couplehood. Both sides recognize the paradox: some of the same states that have rejected gay marriage are endorsing gay adoption. After winning constitutional amendments in 11 states to ban gay marriage in 2004, conservatives put gay adoption in their crosshairs last year--and misfired in every state they targeted. Since then, they have continued to suffer legislative defeats in states like Arkansas, which banned gay marriage in 2004 but earlier this year saw a bill to prohibit gay adoption...
...adoption boom may be less about support for gay rights than it is about the urgency of finding homes for abandoned children. There are as many as 120,000 in the U.S. waiting to be adopted. After Congress ordered states in 1997 to move faster to find more families willing to take in these kids, "child-welfare organizations banded together to get legislatures to allow any qualified parent to adopt, irrespective of sexual orientation," says Rob Woronoff, gay and lesbian program director at the Child Welfare League of America in Washington. The movement got a boost in 2002 when...
Still, most acknowledge that a big reason Colorado's law passed "was that it wasn't [designed as] a gay-adoption bill. It was a second-parent adoption bill" that also allows unmarried heterosexuals to adopt jointly, says Colorado adoption attorney Seth Grob. "It was presented predominantly as child-friendly, not gay-friendly," and therefore ran less risk of alienating potential supporters than gay marriage does...
That approach has frustrated opponents like the Roman Catholic Church--some U.S. dioceses have stopped adoption services altogether rather than comply with state funding rules that require them to allow gay adoption--and the conservative, Colorado-based group Focus on the Family. Bill Maier, Focus' vice president and chief psychologist, insists the practice "hurts children because it intentionally creates motherless or fatherless families," and he accuses child-welfare agencies of "a real biased push to normalize same-sex parenting." He adds, "I don't see any shortage of heterosexual parents willing to adopt." Although they say it's not linked...
...exhilarating." Marcelle Clements, author of The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing the Single Life, notes that there are many women, like Parsons, who were "taken by surprise. They were in relationships that broke up, hit what they thought was catastrophe, only to find that they were O.K., and [they] adopt an attitude that said, I'm fine, I don't need to be with anyone else...