The Board, earlier this year, took the correct action in refusing to adopt discriminatory and unconstitutional regulations designed to force private adoption agencies to either close or place children with practicing homosexual couples.  That decision was taken after allowing the normal period for public comment, as required by law and policy (and after that comment period had resulted in a practically unprecedented groundswell of grassroots public opposition to the proposed attack on adoption agencies).  The demand,  by a bigoted handful of totalitarian fanatics, for a do-over of the comment period in the hopes of hijacking the process, amounts to an assault on the rule of law and the democratic process in our state.

It should be noted that adoptions by homosexual couples are not legally hindered in Virginia, and both public and private agencies cater to those wanting to adopt; there are no cases of such couples being unable to adopt if they wish to.  But there are substantial amounts of social science data indicating that children raised by heterosexual couples are better socialized than their counterparts raised by homosexual couples, and adoption agencies are certainly within their rights in taking this into account.  Most adoption agencies in Virginia are faith-based, and regard homosexual activity as morally wrong; many birth parents do not wish their children to be raised by homosexual couples.  To trample their legal and constitutional rights, and to destroy the adoption system in Virginia with enormous negative consequences to the children left unplaced as a result, would be absolutely unconscionable.  The threat of a lawsuit made earlier by the proponents of the persecuting proposal had no basis in actual law; but if their proposal were adopted, the clear violation of religious freedom would unquestionably result in litigation at both the state and Federal levels, and I believe the Board would certainly lose.