These days Americans need no reminder that our courts can and indeed do make wrong decisions. From the recent 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling (now on hold) declaring the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional to the legal circus surrounding the 2000 presidential election, there is ample evidence that too many judges feel great liberty to issue rulings based on political and not legal reasoning. Increasingly, we are ruled not by our elected representatives, but by activist judges legislating from the bench.
Such is the case with last week's ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court regarding same-sex couple adoptions. Pennsylvania's statutes clearly do not provide for homosexual couples to adopt children, and legislation to permit it has failed even to be voted out of committee. So, as is too often the case, advocates of this social experiment turned to the courts to let them do what the law does not allow.
These advocates lost at the county court level -- in Erie and Lancaster counties, and again at Superior Court, where the court rightly determined that state adoption law, and the statute declaring marriage to be between one man and one woman, precluded these homosexual couples from jointly adopting.
Since that time, more than three years ago, proponents of gay adoption have gained much media attention (most notably in the case of Rosie O'Donnell), swaying public opinion with stories of loving gay couples who simply want to provide caring homes for unwanted children. They fail to mention that in many if not most of these cases (as in Pennsylvania), these are not unwanted, hard-to-adopt children, but rather children conceived through artificial insemination to homosexuals wanting what they can't have naturally.
These emotional tugs on our heartstrings have swayed public opinion (and perhaps even the court's), but they should not form the basis of just and wise public policy. For while the public hears much about Rosie, they hear little, for example, about cases like the deaf lesbian couple who purposely sought out a congenitally deaf donor for artificial insemination, to try and ensure they would have a deaf baby as their pride and joy. They succeeded. (The Washington Post later reported that Marlee Matlin -- the Academy Award-winning deaf actress and mother -- "shook her head in open-mouthed shock" when told about this effort to conceive an intentionally deaf baby. "My personal opinion," Matlin said, "is that I think it's probably important for God to make that decision as opposed to us.")
Our laws should not be forged or later swayed by emotional stories such as these, but rather be established by careful deliberation considering justice, broad social aims, and, in the case of adoption, the well-being of the children.
Indeed, that's what the Pennsylvania Family Institute friend-of-the-court brief argued. From the inception of modern adoption law, the core principle is what is in the best interest of the children. There is no verifiable evidence that it is ever in the best interest of a child to be adopted by a homosexual couple. For example, the American Sociological Review analyzed 21 studies and acknowledged that "researchers frequently downplay findings indicating difference" in outcomes for children of gay and straight parents.
Various studies of lesbian mothers (most "gay parents" are divorced lesbians) found that their children are less likely to conform to traditional gender roles and more likely to engage in homosexual relations themselves; their daughters are "more sexually adventurous and less chaste;" and "lesbian co-parent relationships" are more likely to break up. Other studies show that homosexual relationships are often more violent and much-less committed than heterosexual relationships, and that children in such settings would be at greater risk.
Conversely, there is a huge and growing body of social science evidence that children raised with a married mother and father do far better in every measure of well-being than children who grow up in any other family situation. Rarely is the social science literature as conclusive as it is on this point. The distinct and vital roles moms and dads play in the well-being of children cannot be replicated by two people of the same sex.
Adoption law historically (and on the books in Pennsylvania) was based on the principle adoptio naturam imitatur -- "adoption imitates nature" -- and favored the placement of children in homes with a married mom and a dad. Even single-parent adoption, while not optimum, nevertheless does not preclude the eventuality that a child might eventually have a mom and a dad. Homosexual adoption permanently closes the door to that possibility, and for that reason alone is not in the best interest of the child.
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