a gay or straight couple?
Inspired by this posted in another thread
Do parents have this right?
Once parental rights are severed, the parent has no more say. A parent dropping their kid off at an orphanage or a social service agency who expects to walk away that day without any further responsibility or say would not get to dictate who would adopt the child.
A parent arranging a private adoption or an open adoption would have more right in determining where their child would go.
The original quote was mine. I think your misinterpreting the question, I wasn’t wondering whether the biological parent has the right to dictate what type of family gets their kid, I was wondering if the adoption agency has the right to try and avoid placing the kid with a family that are part of a protected class based on the biological parents request, without running afoul of anti-discrimination laws. The thread concerned a Catholic adoption agency that wanted to impose a blanket ban on letting gay couples adopt from them and were stopped by anti-discrimination laws, I was wondering if they could not let a particular child be adopted by gay parents due to a request of the biological parents without breaking said law.
I suspect that it wouldn’t be a problem, if for no other reason then it probably doesn’t happen often enough to be of concern to officials who monitor such things.
There are state run agencies for adoption, private adoption agencies and private adoptions (done without any agency usually using laywers). These laws vary from state to state.
Private agencies can “require” that you raise the baby to be Catholic or Jewish or Muslim, but in practice there is no legal recourse if they don’t do that.
Usually if the parent has a wish the adoption agency will comply with it.
Speaking for the UK, it’s not specifically SSM (or rather civil partnership as it’s termed here) that give equal rights to adoptive SS parents, but rather anti-discrimination legislation brought in last year. As of December 2008, even religious adoption agencies are no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, so in answer to your question, they would not be allowed to comply with a parent’s request to not place their child with a gay couple.
Canada: the birth parents do not have any say in who the adopitive parents are.
In Spain the laws for marriage and for adoption are different, SSM doesn’t imply that SS couples have the right to adopt. One of the problems being faced by SS couples is that, since there is no specific legislation re. adoption of a partner’s children (bio or adopted) by a same-sax partner, each case is considered by the court individually: get a diplodocus for a judge, he may not only deny adoption to your partner but declare you an unfit mother and give custody of the kids to your mom (mind you, the last one who tried that got sued de oficio by the judges’ college, for being a discriminatory bigot, and lost the right to his job for I-think-one-year).
That said, the bio parents don’t have any say about the choice of adoptive parents.