Gays, Singles Also Targets of Adoption Rule

A controversial regulatory attempt by the Wilson administration to prevent adoptions by unmarried couples is part of a broader social policy stand to discourage adoptions by gays, lesbians and single people, the governor’s chief spokesman says.

Spokesman Sean Walsh acknowledged that anti-discrimination laws and state statutes on adoption prohibit Gov. Pete Wilson from specifically excluding gays, lesbians and singles via the regulatory process. But he made it clear in an interview that Wilson is overtly hopeful of influencing public opinion in that direction.

Adoptions by gays, lesbians and single adults “are not in the best interests of society,” Walsh said. “You affect what you can affect. For the rest you use the bully pulpit.”

As the Department of Social Services held a series of hearings last week on new regulations to oppose adoptions by unmarried couples, Wilson’s critics claimed that his prime motivation was to ban adoptions by gays. Agency spokesmen denied that, saying the proposal was merely aimed at preserving “the sanctity of marriage.”

Only on Friday, with the hearings over and the deadline for public comment past, did the governor’s office clarify the administration’s intent.

The rule against adoptions by unmarried couples would go into effect in 1997 if approved by the state Health and Welfare Agency. It would require private and public adoption agencies to recommend against such placements. Final jurisdiction rests with local judges.

There are more than half a million unmarried couples in California, about 7% of them same-sex couples, according to the Census Bureau. The ratio of unmarried couples to married couples in California--1 in 11--is nearly twice as high as in the country at large.

Carole Shauffer, executive director of the Youth Law Center in San Francisco, was one of many advocates who believed that the ban on unmarried adoptions was an attempt by Wilson to court the religious right with an unspoken slap at gays and lesbians. She noted that the hearings on the new regulations came just weeks after Wilson’s decision to support legislation that would ban recognition of gay marriages in California.

“This is a very cynical way to make a political point,” Shauffer said.

As criticism mounted last week, state social services officials said the proposed regulations were in no way intended to target gay couples or singles. However, critics noted that the preamble of the regulations states that “a child’s interests are best served by a family that has both two parents and male and female role models.”

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Technically, the governor asked the bureaucracy to promulgate formal regulations to replace an informal policy against adoptions by unmarried couples that dated back to 1987 and was only halfheartedly enforced.

Walsh said the proposal reflects Wilson’s belief that most of the ills of modern society are the result of single-parent and other nontraditional families. “The general debasement of human values, the social pathology, has to do with what’s happening to families,” Walsh said. “With a mother and father in the house, you learn right from wrong.”

Opposition to the proposed regulations has been swift and furious and has come from many quarters.

Local child welfare agencies, swamped with thousands upon thousands of abused and neglected children needing adoptive placement, were fearful that the small pool of homes would shrink even further if unmarried couples were eliminated.

The revolution in living arrangements and the explosion of abused and neglected children is a dangerous combination, San Mateo County family services executive Stuart Oppenheim said in written testimony to the state.

Oppenheim noted that 30,000 children below the age of 6 entered the state foster care system in 1993 and 1994 and that 23% would neither go back home nor be adopted in the next six years.

In Los Angeles County, officials said, the percentage of abused and neglected toddlers expected to languish in foster care is 38%.

“We must ask the question, why would we want to do anything to discourage adoptions?” Oppenheim testified. “And yet this is exactly what the department is proposing to do. Let us not adopt regulations that say to some, ‘You go away because you do not fit into a narrowly acceptable mode of behavior that in truth has nothing to do with your ability to parent a child.’ ”

The pool would further shrink, advocates for children said, because the proposed regulations so clearly discourage single people from adopting even if they do not outright prohibit it.

Los Angeles County adoption officials said that single parents account for 25% of the adoptions here and are a particular resource when it comes to placing older or high-risk children.

“When you’re single and you read something like this, you think you’re not wanted,” said Virginia Weisz, a children’s rights attorney at Public Counsel in Los Angeles, referring to the preamble to the proposed regulations. “You think you’re a second-class citizen so you don’t even make the call. You say forget it, or you go to a foreign country” to adopt a child.

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The Wilson regulations would attempt to block the so-called limited consent adoptions in which one member of a gay couple legally adopts the other’s child. These adoptions, which are common in big cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, guarantee the de facto parent the same rights as the legal parent, including making medical decisions and providing benefits to the child.

Presumably, judges in metropolitan areas would continue to approve these limited consent adoptions, said Joan Heifetz Hollinger, a visiting professor of law at UC Berkeley and a nationally recognized expert on adoptions.

“But in [rural areas such as] Tulare, Stanislaus, the judges that want to say no can rely on the recommendations,” she said.

Hollinger, who has studied the history of adoption, also noted that the proposed regulations would “embarrass” California by putting the state in “the dark ages” in terms of evolving public policy.

Over time, Hollinger said, adoption law has moved from blanket exclusions--like those that disqualified families that weren’t composed of a working father and a stay-at-home mother or parents who didn’t attend church--to individual assessments, which encouraged social workers to judge each situation on its merits.

“That is one of the basic principles of child welfare,” Hollinger said.

Hollinger said any regulations that made adoptions harder would cost the state huge sums of money at a time it can ill afford it.

“Adoption is a private solution to a public crisis,” she said, “and it ought to be supported and encouraged. If children aren’t placed, the state will have to pay for them forever.”

Times staff writers Virginia Ellis and David Reyes contributed to this story.