SHOULD MARRIED COUPLES GET PREFERENCE IN ADOPTION?: Lee Walzer
One other point. I might be more inclined to agree with you that children should be BORN into a married relationship. I say this in part because many of those who become pregnant out of wedlock are not ready emotionally etc to raise a child on their own. So, it's axiomatic that such children, on the whole, would be better off in a married relationship.
Adoption is different though. You are dealing with a population of kids who have no parents and who will invariably benefit from having a permanent home, whether it's with a same-sex couple, a heterosexual married couple, or a single parent. And there are far more kids in need of homes, whether in our own public adoption system or internationally, than there are available parents. You need to find good parents period.
And, thinking further about things, you need not worry as much as you are about the system not taking married couples into account enough. While the NC case you cite is interesting, it is most definitely not the norm. I know anecdotally that married couples invariably are preferred -- whether by birthmoms seeking a private placement for their child, in the public system, or by foreign governments.
I'll close with a truly radical additional thought: That gay parents may make better adoptive parents as a group than heterosexual married couples. There is still a lot of prejudice against adoption in this country and heterosexual married couples mostly come to adoption by default -- as a second-best choice necessitated by infertility, which often creates years of grief for such couples. Same-sex couples (especially male couples) do not come to adoption as a second-best option -- they embrace the idea as a way of becoming parents. And although it's changing, for years the only kids that gay couples could adopt from the public system were the most damaged/least wanted -- HIV-positive, differently abled, lots of emotional/learning issues, or even simply non-caucasian kids. In many cases, were it not for gay parents, these kids would never have a forever family.
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