A lesbian couple in Utah was denied the adoption of a 1-year-old baby girl. It’s particularly shocking since same-sex marriage was legalized across the country, this summer, which marked as a victory for basic civil rights. But it seems that there will be more battles to fight.
April Hoagman and Beckie Peirce are a lesbian couple who have been raising a 1-year-old baby girl for three months. They hoped to adopt her and were waiting for a routine hearing in family court, which they thought would be pretty easy going since they had, after all, passed the background checks and home inspections required of them to be qualified to foster children. Besides that, the couple has been raising Peirce’s two children quite capably for years in what appears to be a very happy home. That’s why when Judge Scott Johansen of Price, Utah, ordered for the baby girl to be taken from their home and to be placed with a heterosexual couple, the couple was so devastated.
Hoagland told a local news outlet that the decision was
“…heartbreaking. We’ve been told to care for this child like a mother would, and I am her mother.”
Judge Johansen cited without any evidence of studies that prove that children raised by heterosexual couples do better than children raised by same-sex couples. A report released by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2013 that compiled data from 30 years of studying how children fare when they are raised by same-sex parents showed that gay couples are as loving, capable and well-equipped to be parents — and foster parents — as straight couples are.
Even then, Johansen ordered the couple to give up the child within a span of a week. This order based on discrimination against homosexuality is what the couple and the state’s Division of Child and Family Services tend to fight. This judge’s action speak a lot: denying the basic civil rights to the same-sex couple is deemed OKAY, which in reality, should not be!
