Should same-sex couples be allowed to adopt children?

It’s a question that Mississippi has answered with a one-sentence law that was adopted in 2000. But much has changed since then, and now the state’s ban is being challenged.

According to the New York Times, “Mississippi’s ban is now the only one of its kind in the nation. And legal experts said that in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s decision upholding same-sex marriage it was highly unlikely the state’s ban could hold up in court. The lawsuit (challenging the ban) was filed by the Campaign for Southern Equality, the Family Equality Council and four Mississippi same-sex couples.”

While many will object to same-sex adoptions for moral and religious reasons, there’s another side of this to consider. Would children in foster care be better off in a group foster home where they may or may not be treated as a son or daughter, or in the home of a same-sex couple?

Anyone with experience in the state’s foster system will tell you that it’s not pretty.  For some foster parents, the children are simply a source of income; being a foster parent is simply a job. Children are sometimes shuffled from foster home to foster home, and many are never adopted. They simply bounce from home to home until they eventually age out of the system. Is that experience preferred over allowing same-sex couples to adopt?

If some in Mississippi oppose same-sex adoption on moral or religious grounds (and many do), then those same people should open their homes to the thousands of abused or neglected children in need of adoption. Anything less would be immoral.