Chilean gvmt ‘will not oppose’ gay adoption

With the collaboration of the socialist government of Michele Bachelet, homosexual organizations expect to win approval for gay couples to adopt children, in the reform of the Chilean adoption system that the Legislature will carry out during the upcoming months.

During the last days of June and the first week of July, there have been meetings of the Minister of Justice, Javiera Blanco, with the homosexual lobby to address the legalization of adoption of children by homosexuals. One of the meetings happened on June 29, with the Movimiento de Integración y Liberación Homosexual (Movilh, in the Spanish acronym), and the other on July 3, with the Fundación Iguales.

“The minister said she is favorable and explained that, should the government be consulted about the matter, it will make a positive pronouncement. This is very important in a moment when the Congress is debating a reform of the Adoption Law,” claimed Rolando Jiménez, an activist of Movilh, in declarations to the Chilean newspaper La Tercera, published on July 6.

Consulted by the same newspaper, the minister Javiera Blanco was more cautious in his response. He said the Legislature is responsible for possible changes, but also stated that the government “would not oppose” them. “This is a motion presented by parliamentarians. There are two different [motions] with different scopes. We are not going to make opposition to any of them. We will not oppose,” she said.

The motions to which Blanco refers are two modifications of the Bill of the Integral Reform of the Adoption System in Chile, which is being processed since 2013 in the House of Representatives. Both pave the way to the legalization of adoption of children by homosexuals and have been proposed by parties that belong to the coalition that is part of the government.

One of the motions was presented by the president of the Family Commission of the House of Representatives, Ramon Farías, of the leftist Partido para la Democracia (PP), of ex-president Ricardo Lagos; the other was proposed by Deputy Daniella Cicardini, of the Partido Socialista (PS), the same party of President Michelle Bachelet.

The motion of PS was proposed right after the legalization of homosexual unions in Chile through the Civil Union Agreement (AUC, in the Spanish acronym). The law that creates the AUC gives juridical recognition to homosexual couples that cohabitate and, in practice, equates them to marriage.

The law that regulates the AUC was approved in the Congress last January andpromulgated by Bachelet last April. Homosexual cohabiting received almost all the same rights of a marriage, with the exception of adoption.

On that occasion, the homosexual lobby made clear that they were pleased but not satisfied. Rolando Jiménez, of Movilh, said the AUC was “very good,” but did not give “complete equality.” Luis Larraín, president of Fundación Iguales, warned, “The civil union is part of an ambitious agenda, we are only in the first year of the government. We will continue in order to regulate, for example, the filiation, which is not contained in the bill. We want egalitarian marriage.”

There already exists an Inter-ministerial Bureau, created by Bachelet, which seeks to address the mechanisms to advance the so-called "egalitarian marriage,” a euphemism created to equate unions between homosexuals to marriage. And now there is a large articulation to approve adoption in the Congress.

According to La Tercera, in the aforementioned meetings, Minister Blanco warned that it would be difficult for the government to guarantee that, in the adoption process, homosexual couples could be considered as capable as couples of complimentary sexes to adopt a child.