Gay adoption is legal in most states and it has
typically polled better than same-sex marriage, which is why many Republican candidates have been dodging the topic and some wonder if it may become
a bigger sticking point for the GOP in 2016 than gay marriage.
Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, in particular, have avoided commenting on it even as Florida's Republican lawmakers have been debating ways to reinstate the state's gay adoption ban, which was struck down in 2010 by a state appeals court.
It's a sharp contrast from about a decade ago. Here's Rubio, the candidate of tomorrow, in 2006:
“Some of these kids are the most disadvantaged in the state,” Rubio is quoted saying for a 2006 article in the Tallahassee Democrat. “They shouldn’t be forced to be part of a social experiment.”
Bush also stood firmly against it in the early aughts. Here's what he
had to say in a 2002 debate:
"If you're going to have permanency, it should be with a loving couple that is a man and a wife. That is the law of this land, it's in the courts, but I also believe that personally," Bush said.
For more on the GOP's gay adoption conundrum, head below the fold.
And a statement in 2004 after a federal appeals court upheld Florida's ban:
"The decision validates Florida's conclusion that it is in the best interest of adopted children, many of whom come from troubled and unstable backgrounds, to be placed in a home anchored both by a father and a mother," Bush said in a news release.
More recently Bush said, "Previously, I opposed gay adoption, but it has since become the law in our state, and I respect that decision." But that doesn't tell us what he thinks now.
So which is it? Is it better for kids to have a loving household provided by same-sex parents or no home at all? It's no insignificant question since one of the marriage cases heard by the Supreme Court last month involved a Michigan lesbian couple—two nurses—in which each of them adopted two special-needs children (four special-needs children altogether). The reason they brought the case was because they couldn't co-adopt the children and an accidental death of one of them would send two of their children back into the foster care system.
If those two women, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, aren't doing God's work, I don't know who is. But perhaps Rubio still thinks the family they have provided for those four children is a "social experiment" gone awry.