Arkansas Supreme Court strikes down ban on gays as foster parents

I'm very happy to see this breaking news. The Arkansas Department of Health and Human (Dis)Services was not only forbidding homosexual couples from adopting, but a man was not allowed to be a foster parent because his homosexual son sometimes lives with him. Utter nonsense and hopefully this ruling will slap them hard.

The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday said that gays can qualify as foster parents and that barring them from parenting foster children was based on one group’s view of morality.

In a unanimous ruling upholding a lower court decision that a state ban was unconstitutional, the high court said that no connection exists between a foster child’s well-being and the sexual orientation of that child’s foster parents. Justices agreed with Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox’s 2004 ruling that the ban seeks to regulate “public morality” — something the board was not given the authority to do. And the high court said the state Child Welfare Agency Review Board in adopting the ban violated the separation of powers doctrine.

The board instituted the ban in March 1999, saying children should be in traditional two-parent homes because they are more likely to thrive in that environment. Four Arkansans sued, saying homosexuals who otherwise qualified as foster parents had been discriminated against. They contended the ban violated their right to privacy and equal protection under the state and U.S. constitutions.


Here's my earlier post with a well-written editorial from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Also a link here to yahoo news.