Homosexual couples in New Jersey will for the first time be able to adopt children jointly, just as married couples can, under an agreement reached on Wednesday with state child welfare officials.
Gay advocacy groups, which negotiated the agreement with the state, hailed it as an important step toward full recognition of gay and lesbian parental rights.State regulations previously did not allow unmarried couples to adopt a child jointly in a single proceeding, requiring them instead to go through the already difficult and costly process twice.
While the settlement grew out of a challenge by gay and lesbian groups, the change also applies to cohabiting heterosexual couples, said Michelle Guhl, deputy commissioner of the State Human Services Department.
Michael Adams, staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, represented more than 200 gay and lesbian families in a class-action suit against the state policy.
Adams lauded the decision as "historic" and one that made New Jersey the first state to say specifically in its adoption policy that gay and unmarried couples would be measured by the same standards as married couples.
But other advocacy groups around the country and experts in child welfare policies suggested that the agreement was remarkable only insofar as it explicitly allowed a category of adoptions that have been quietly taking place in a number of states in recent years.
Anne Sullivan, an adoption researcher with the Child Welfare League of America, representing state child welfare officials across the nation, said allowing such joint adoptions was significant. But, she added, "it has been going on rather discreetly" in a number of states already.
Once child welfare officials and family courts in states around the country got beyond the "mythology surrounding the heated issue of homosexual adoptions" in recent years, she said, such adoptions have become more prevalent in a variety of forms, from single-parent to stepparent adoptions and joint adoptions.
Only two states, New Hampshire and Florida, have laws specifically barring gay men and lesbians from adopting children.