Is there a right to adopt, regardless what others think of your behavior?
There is not. However, there is the right to be considered as a coequal candidate for adoption. The debate here is whether homosexuality, in and of itself, is a valid reason for disqualifying someone out of hand for such candidacy.
Either homosexuality is a choice, or it is not. Certainly homosexual
behavior is a choice, just as heterosexual behavior is (before anyone jumps on this to tell me that it's not a choice, it's the Way of Nature, answer this question: Have you ever had sexual attraction to someone of the opposite sex, but not acted upon it? If so, you made a choice. Your orientation caused you to have a desire, and your intellect chose not to pursue it). But so far the evidence is that the actual orientation itself is not generally chosen.
Earlier in the thread, CAnnoneer referred to homosexuality as "no more natural (or decadent/deviant for that matter) than any other congenital deformity." While I consider his views on this to be unnecessarily repugnant, let's take a look at it from this perspective: If homosexuality is a congenital deformity, then it is absolutely not a choice.
Further, if we should refuse to allow homosexual couples to adopt under the notion that they are congenitally deformed, it would therefore also be necessary to exclude any and all people who have other deformities as well. How could a woman with only one hand be a good mother, after all? It's fairly obvious that anyone who is not of purest genealogical stock should not be given the opportunity to raise a child.
Oh, wait, if homosexuality is a
congenital defect, then there's...(counting on fingers)...
zero chance of it "infecting" a child. Just like a woman missing a hand will not cause an adopted child to grow a stump. Oops.
So now we're left with
behavior. It can be argued up and down and left and right that homosexual behavior is either wrong or not wrong. But apart from the fact that it involves either two "innies" or two "outies", there is no deviance that a homosexual couple can get up to that a straight couple cannot.
What a couple does in the bedroom behind closed doors is something that should not be a part of a young child's realm of knowledge. If it
is part of the child's knowledge, then Mom and Dad, or Mom and Mom, or Dad and Dad aren't being discreet, and their orientation bears upon that...not at all.
If we can assume for the sake of argument that a gay couple would be as discreet as the model straight couple everyone wants to adopt Little Molly (as Stand_watie said, "all other character issues of the involved parties being equal"), then we're down to an argument of choices.
Which of these choices should the government use as a touchstone for whether a couple is fit to be adoptive parents:
Whether they choose to own guns?
Whether they choose to go to a particular church?
Whether they choose to support the correct political party?
None of these are valid governmental reasons for granting or dismissing a petition for adoption. Why? Because none of them (other than in a purely subjective sense) reflect upon how well they will raise the child.
Whether they choose to love someone who happens to have similar plumbing?
Again, not valid. Because (again, as Stand_watie said, "all other character issues of the involved parties being equal") there is nothing but a subjective indication that such a couple would be inadequate parents.
Anything that a gay couple can do, any perversion of wit or behavior or environment, can also be visited upon a child by a straight couple. So the only question that
should remain is:
Does this couple have a loving home, and the committed intent to share that loving home with the child they wish to adopt?
If the answer is "yes", then color (not a choice), orientation (not a choice), religion (a choice outside the realm of government control), philosophy (a choice outside the realm of government control), partnership (a choice outside the realm of government control)...none of these should matter.
-BP
