Child Welfare Organizations Say Ban Only Hurts Children in Need of Homes
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: media@aclu.org
LITTLE ROCK, AR – A seven-year legal battle over the blanket exclusion of
lesbian and gay people from serving as foster parents in Arkansas drew closer to
an outcome today as attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union asked the
State Supreme Court to uphold an earlier court decision striking down the
state’s anti-gay ban.
“Every mainstream child welfare organization has been saying for years that
preventing lesbian and gay people from serving as foster parents has no basis in
social science and only hurts the children the state should be protecting,” said
Rita Sklar, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arkansas. “Children who need
foster homes deserve better than to be deprived of good homes just so the state
can make a misguided political statement against gay people.”
The lawsuit, challenging a state regulation that bans gay people and anyone
living in a household with a gay adult from being foster parents in the state,
was filed against the state in 1999 by four prospective foster parents.
Several prominent child welfare groups have taken an interest in the case, with
friend-of-the-court briefs being submitted by the Arkansas Advocates for
Children and Families, Child Welfare League of America, the National Association
of Social Workers and its Arkansas chapter, the American Psychological
Association and its Arkansas chapter, and the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption
Institute.
In a landmark ruling in December of 2004, a Pulaski County Circuit Court
judge flatly rejected all of the claims the state had made about gay and lesbian
people’s suitability as parents. After five days of expert testimony, the
judge found that the foster care ban can hurt children by eliminating a pool of
effective foster parents; that children of lesbian and gay parents are just as
well adjusted as children of straight parents; and that there are no
reasons that health, safety, or welfare of a foster child might be negatively
impacted by living in a foster home where there is a gay person present.
“Under state law, every potential foster parent is already required to
undergo strict screening before being qualified to foster parent. The trial
judge understood that blanket exclusions do nothing to advance the welfare of
foster children,” said Leslie Cooper, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU
Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project, who argued the case before the court.
“Categorical bans like this one do nothing but tie the hands of child placement
professionals and unnecessarily disqualify people who could provide safe, secure
homes.”
Arkansas’s Child Welfare Agency Review Board established a policy in 1999
that “no person may serve as a foster parent if any adult member of that
person’s household is a homosexual.” That same year, the ACLU filed a
lawsuit challenging the policy on behalf of a lesbian from Fayetteville, a gay
couple from Little Rock, and a heterosexual man from Waldron whose gay son
sometimes lives at home. All of them want to serve as foster parents but
are prevented from doing so by the ban.
Cooper and James Esseks of the ACLU’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender
Project, and ACLU of Arkansas cooperating attorney John Burnett represent the
prospective foster parents.
More information on the case, Howard v. Child Welfare Agency Review Board,
can be found online at http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/parenting/12137res20050301.html
