Kids need a home

Last week, State Sen. Patricia Miller, R-Indianapolis, proposed a bill to ban gays and single people from using medical technology to have children. Her rationale for the motion was to harmonize state reproductive laws with state adoption laws. She figured if gays and singles aren't allowed to adopt kids, why should they be allowed to have their own? Happily, this idiotic bill was withdrawn so quickly you would have received whiplash had you tried to read it, but it does open up a line of questions. Why aren't gays and singles allowed to adopt kids?\nIndiana is currently one of six states that has either made gay adoption illegal, or made it so difficult for gays to adopt that the effect is about the same. (The other five states are Florida, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and Colorado.) The arguments behind banning or hindering gay adoption are varied, but the predominant argument is that married heterosexual couples are the ideal parental structure and should be the one that is sought out. \nIt might well be that heterosexual parents are your ideal. That's fine. However, the problem we face today is that there is a shortage of married heterosexual couples willing to adopt children. There is a large gap between the number of children currently in the foster care system who need an adoptive home and the number of "acceptable" people willing to adopt them. Prohibiting homosexuals and singles who are willing to adopt condemns many children to the foster care system. \nThe temporary and unstable realities of foster care have been conclusively shown to contribute to higher levels of delinquency, substance abuse and academic problems. While there might be short-comings in the eyes of some critics of gay and single-parent homes, the deficiencies in those sorts of homes cannot be worse than those created by leaving kids in the foster care system. \nThere is an additional host of arguments against gay adoption. Ancillary arguments include the notion that gay parents are more likely to have or raise children who experiment with homosexuality or that homosexuals are more likely to molest their kids. Of course, the ancillary arguments are extremely homophobic. They also happen to be false. The majority of studies on the question suggest that children who grow up with gay parents are not significantly more likely to identify as homosexual when they are adults than children with heterosexual parents. Furthermore, according to www.youdebate.com, men who describe themselves as heterosexual are seven to nine times more likely to be a pedophile than a self-identified homosexual. \nWhile Sen. Miller's radical bill was nothing short of vile, it does at least serve the purpose of putting state adoption laws back into the spotlight. Hopefully, the same forces that coalesced to pressure out her bill can work together to remove similar prohibitions. We shouldn't condemn children to live in unstable situations because of widespread homophobia in our state. As the son of a woman who lived part of her life in the foster care system, I can vouch that any safe home is better than no home at all.