Colombia’s Supreme Court legalizes homosexual adoption
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| Gay Couple with child (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
In what local media are calling a “historic”
decision, last week Colombia’s highest court made it legal for same-sex couples
to adopt children.
After the ruling, the justices released a statement
declaring that denying a child a family “based only on a person’s or a couple’s
sexual orientation, represents an unacceptable restriction to the child’s
rights, and is contrary to their superior interest, protected by the
Constitution.”
“A person’s sexual orientation or their sex are not
in themselves indicators of moral, physical or mental suitability to adopt,”
stated court president, Maria Victoria Calle, in a press conference.
According to Calle, “excluding these types of
couples from potential adoptees implies a limitation to the children for them
to have a family.”
“There has not been a valid conclusion that shows
minors suffer any affectation by being adopted and growing up in a same-sex
family environment,” she explained.
A recent study by American sociologist Paul Sullins
concluded that “Emotional problems [are] over twice as prevalent for
children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.”
When his study was published last January, Sullins
confidently declared: “It is no longer accurate to claim that no study has
found children in same-sex families to be disadvantaged relative to those in
opposite-sex families.”
Another study published in 2013 by a Canadian
researcher found that children in same-sex households were only 65 percent as
likely to graduate from high school as those living in traditional opposite sex
marriage families.
Reactions came on Thursday, November 5, when the
Colombian Episcopal Conference issued a release saying the Colombian bishops
“lament and reject the recent decision made by the Constitutional Court of
Colombia.”
“We firmly believe that with the Constitutional
Court’s decision, the rights of minors are being undermined,” said the bishops.
Adoption, they declared, “is above all a measure for the protection of the
child and should never be considered a ‘right’ of those who adopt.”
The Evangelical Confederation of Colombia also
expressed their rejection of the Court’s decision by publishing a press release
declaring the ruling as “contrary to democracy and against human nature.”
The court, they said “has violated the rights of a
whole country to benefit a minority.”
Both Catholics and Evangelicals called for a
national referendum to vote on the matter, and both churches’ leaders urged
their faithful to manifest themselves peacefully against the recent ruling.
Same-sex couples in Colombia cannot marry but may
be united by civil unions. On February 2015, the law allowed for homosexuals to
adopt as long as the minor was their partner’s biological child. The new law
will allow homosexuals to adopt without any restrictions.
