Fla. court throws out law banning adoption by gays

MIAMI - A Miami-Dade circuit judge declared Florida's 31-year-old ban on adoptions by gay people unconstitutional yesterday, allowing a Miami-area man to adopt two foster children he has raised since 2004.

In a 53-page order that sets the stage for a possible constitutional showdown, Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman permitted Frank Gill, 47, to adopt the half-brothers, now 8 and 4, whom he and his partner of eight years have raised since around Christmas four years ago.

A child-abuse investigator had asked Gill to care for the boys temporarily; they were never able to return to their birth parents.

"These children are thriving; it is uncontroverted," the judge said.

Moments after the ruling, attorneys for Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum said they would appeal. Florida is the only state that outright bars gays from adopting, though it allows gay men and lesbians to be foster parents.

The state attorney general's office had argued that gays were disproportionately more likely to suffer from mental illness or a substance-abuse problem than straight people, rendering them less fit to be parents - especially of children in foster care who already are under stress.

But in a ruling that at times read more like a social-science research paper, Lederman dissected 30 years' worth of psychological and sociological research, concluding that studies overwhelmingly show that gay people can parent every bit as effectively as straight people and do no harm to their children.

"Based on the evidence presented from experts from all over this country and abroad," Lederman wrote, "it is clear that sexual orientation is not a predictor of a person's ability to parent."

Gill said he was "elated" by the ruling. "I cried tears of joy for the first time in my life," he said outside Miami's juvenile courthouse.

Lederman, who oversees Miami's juvenile and child-welfare courts, is the second judge this year to declare the state's blanket ban on adoption by gay men and lesbians unconstitutional.

In August, Monroe Circuit Judge David John Audlin Jr. wrote that Florida's 1977 gay-adoption ban arose out of "unveiled expressions of bigotry" when the state was experiencing a severe backlash to demands for civil rights by gay people in Miami.