Gay Adoption Ban Proposed in Arkansas

"Family" groups continue to push extreme agendas across the nation. This is the latest:

A group called Family Council wants to make it illegal for a couple living together - gay or straight - to adopt children, if voters approve the change.

The wording on a proposed ballot measure that would bar gays and lesbians from actually adopting children has been submitted to the Arkansas Attorney General. The group, working out of Little Rock, wants to ban unmarried sexual partners who live together from adopting or becoming foster parents.

If it is approved by Attorney General Dustin McDaniel the Arkansas Family Council would be able to begin collecting the 61,974 signatures of registered voters needed to have the question put to voters in 2008.

“As we looked into this issue, we discovered that cohabiting heterosexual homes were not good places for children, either,” said Jerry Cox, president of the Family Council.

Unlike a Family Council bill that lawmakers rejected in the recent legislative session, the proposed ballot initiative doesn’t target gays specifically. But gays and lesbians who live as couples need marriage equality, and want to grow families. Arkansas recently approved a constitutional amendment codifying marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution.

The Family Council, which is affiliated with Colorado-based Focus on the Family, was the leading organization behind the constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

Arkansas’s Child Welfare Agency Review Board had established a policy in 1999 that banned gay people from serving as foster parents, and the Arkansas Supreme Court struck it down after a seven-year legal battle between the state and the ACLU.

Governor Beebe has declined to comment on the ballot measure while the Attorney General's office is reviewing it.