US professor, John Culhane, asks a question relevant to Australia: why same-sex adoption, but not marriage?
Whenever I speak about LGBT rights, audiences are hard-pressed to explain why almost all states allow gays and lesbians – single or partnered – to adopt or foster-parent children, but so few allow us to marry. Wouldn’t it make more sense to recognize the couple’s relationship first, and then move toward allowing same-sex couples to create families through foster care or adoption?
In fact, this is how several European countries have proceeded. In the Netherlands, for example, same-sex couples were afforded increasing levels of benefits and recognition over a period of many years, but the right to adopt was granted much more recently. Even today in France, same-sex couples can enter in a “pacte civile” (with many of the rights and benefits of marriage) but they can’t adopt.
We seem to have gotten this backward. I feel the effects of this topsy-turvy approach in my own life: My partner and I adopted our daughters, but we can’t give our kids the security that would come from their parents’ marriage.
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Same-sex adoption is allowed in half of Australia’s states and territories.