Majority of Florida voters favour an end to ban on gay adoption
A new poll has found that 55% of people in Florida would support the repeal of a law banning gay people from adopting.
Florida is currently the only American state that expressly bans all gays and lesbians from adopting.
The state does allow them to foster parent.
A Quinnipiac University poll of 1,370 Floridians found 39% in favour of the ban.
The poll sample was split on gay marriage. 31% opposed any legal recognition, 27% backed gay marriage and 35% approved of civil unions.
A national survey commissioned by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation of 2,008 US adults in November found 69% oppose laws that would ban qualified gay and lesbian couples from adopting children.
In several states, gay and lesbian couples are banned from adopting.
In November a judge in Florida ruled that a gay man can adopt his two foster children.
The ruling by Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman may lead the state to appeal to the Florida Supreme Court.
Frank Martin Gill, a 54-year-old North Miami man, challenged Florida’s decades-old law banning all gay and lesbian people from adopting children.
Judge Lederman decided that Gill’s sexual orientation should not preclude him from being able to adopt his two foster children, whom he has parented for more than four years.
Action on this case at the State Supreme Court level could overturn Florida’s decade’s old ban on gays and lesbians adopting children.
Gay and lesbian parents are raising 4% of all adopted children in the United States, approximately 65,500 children. Three percent are being raised by single lesbians and gay men and 1% by same-sex couples.
The Census in 2000 estimates indicate that 6% of children in non-kin care, with caretakers other than extended family members, are being raised by gay, lesbian, and bisexual foster parents, a total of 14,134 of the nearly 500,000 children living in foster care on any given day.
Gay and lesbian foster parents are more likely to raise children with disabilities—32% of all foster children with disabilities reside with gay and lesbian parents.
