The Arkansas State Supreme Court today delivered a huge smackdown to the State's DHS for banning gay foster parents...citing board members for using personal biases and religious beliefs in setting state regulations.
ARK. SUPREME COURT -- GAY FOSTER PARENTS OK
This comes as a shock to some who've tried to fight it to the top. More interesting than the ruling itself, which most likely didn't have anybody in doubt, is what the ruling means in terms of the state's gay marriage ban. Will it put that in danger, or just shoot down the state's attempt to bring the ban into the legal argument against these parents? Here's a .pdf file of the ruling, and a little more on the story for you.
The Arkansas Supreme Court on Thursday said that gays can qualify as foster parents and that barring them from parenting foster children was based on one group's view of morality.
In a unanimous ruling upholding a lower court decision that a state ban was unconstitutional, the high court said that no connection exists between a foster child's well-being and the sexual orientation of that child's foster parents. Justices agreed with Pulaski County Circuit Judge Tim Fox's ruling that the ban seeks to regulate "public morality" - something the board was not given the authority to do. And the high court said the state Child Welfare Agency Review Board in adopting the ban violated the separation of powers doctrine.
"There is no correlation between the health, welfare and safety of foster children and the blanket exclusion of any individual who is a homosexual or who resides in a household with a homosexual," Associate Justice Donald Corbin wrote in the opinion.
We found interesting the section under findings of fact that the High Court upheld the ruling of the lower courts -- what comes out (no pun intended) is that essentially board members who created the regulation showed little or any regard for either the concept of equal justice under law, and flagrantly used their own biases to make the rules, without regard to past experience and past research. A head scratcher. More at
Arkansas Tonight.