Opinion ID: 76424
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Florida's Asserted Rational Bases

Text: 37 Cognizant of the narrow parameters of our review, we now analyze the challenged Florida law. Florida contends that the statute is only one aspect of its broader adoption policy, which is designed to create adoptive homes that resemble the nuclear family as closely as possible. Florida argues that the statute is rationally related to Florida's interest in furthering the best interests of adopted children by placing them in families with married mothers and fathers. Such homes, Florida asserts, provide the stability that marriage affords and the presence of both male and female authority figures, which it considers critical to optimal childhood development and socialization. In particular, Florida emphasizes a vital role that dual-gender parenting plays in shaping sexual and gender identity and in providing heterosexual role modeling. Florida argues that disallowing adoption into homosexual households, which are necessarily motherless or fatherless and lack the stability that comes with marriage, is a rational means of furthering Florida's interest in promoting adoption by marital families. 17 38 Florida clearly has a legitimate interest in encouraging a stable and nurturing environment for the education and socialization of its adopted children. See, e.g., Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429, 433, 104 S.Ct. 1879, 1882, 80 L.Ed.2d 421 (1984) (The State, of course, has a duty of the highest order to protect the interests of minor children, particularly those of tender years.); Stanley, 405 U.S. at 652, 92 S.Ct. at 1213 (noting that protect[ing] the moral, emotional, mental, and physical welfare of the minor is a legitimate interest[], well within the power of the State to implement) (internal quotation marks omitted). It is chiefly from parental figures that children learn about the world and their place in it, and the formative influence of parents extends well beyond the years spent under their roof, shaping their children's psychology, character, and personality for years to come. In time, children grow up to become full members of society, which they in turn influence, whether for good or ill. The adage that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world hardly overstates the ripple effect that parents have on the public good by virtue of their role in raising their children. It is hard to conceive an interest more legitimate and more paramount for the state than promoting an optimal social structure for educating, socializing, and preparing its future citizens to become productive participants in civil society — particularly when those future citizens are displaced children for whom the state is standing in loco parentis. 39 More importantly for present purposes, the state has a legitimate interest in encouraging this optimal family structure by seeking to place adoptive children in homes that have both a mother and father. Florida argues that its preference for adoptive marital families is based on the premise that the marital family structure is more stable than other household arrangements and that children benefit from the presence of both a father and mother in the home. Given that appellants have offered no competent evidence to the contrary, we find this premise to be one of those unprovable assumptions that nevertheless can provide a legitimate basis for legislative action. Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49, 62-63, 93 S.Ct. 2628, 2638, 37 L.Ed.2d 446 (1973). Although social theorists from Plato to Simone de Beauvoir have proposed alternative child-rearing arrangements, none has proven as enduring as the marital family structure, nor has the accumulated wisdom of several millennia of human experience discovered a superior model. See, e.g., Plato, The Republic, Bk. V, 459d-461e; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (H.M. Parshley trans., Vintage Books 1989) (1949). Against this sum of experience, it is rational for Florida to conclude that it is in the best interests of adoptive children, many of whom come from troubled and unstable backgrounds, to be placed in a home anchored by both a father and a mother. Paris Adult Theatre I, 413 U.S. at 63, 93 S.Ct. at 2638.