Making Sense of the Gay Adoption Ban

I was hoping someone would respond to Eduardo's earlier question on the Massachusetts bishops' attempt to gain an exemption allowing Catholic Charities to categorically exclude gay couples from adoption.  I generally resist state efforts to impose contested moral norms on religious groups, but I'm troubled by the bishops' decision to contest this moral norm, at least to the extent that it impacts the well-being of children.  This news report underscores, in my view, the difficulty with the bishops' position:

Of the 720 adoptions handled by Catholic Charities of Boston since 1987, roughly 60 percent involve foster children with the DSS, and 40 percent are babies and children who come into the agency from individual families.

Of the approximately 430 foster children adopted through Catholic Charities during that time period, 13 were placed with same-sex couples, said Virginia Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the agency.

They were all children who had been abused or neglected and were considered hard to place because they are older or have special needs, Reynolds said.

It is easier to understand the Church's opposition to civil marriage being opened to homosexuals if we understand marriage as not just a reflection of human relationships as they are, but as an aspirational statement of relationships as they should be.  (There is still the potentially insurmountable problem of translating the aspirational quality of marriage from a religious notion into an aspiration that resonates in non-religious terms.)  But for adoption, it seems that we need to view public policy as a reflection of reality, not aspiration: there are abused and neglected children who are very difficult to place in loving environments.  Why would we want to categorically preclude a segment of the population from providing such environments simply because the Church's ideal form of relationship is not reflected in that environment?

If the Massachusetts bishops' opposition to gay adoption under all circumstances emanates from the same aspirational norm as the opposition to gay marriage, that seems problematic.  But if the opposition emanates from a conviction that the discernible measures of children's well-being are negatively impacted in gay adoption scenarios such that those adoptions should be precluded outright, then it seems that it will boil down to a battle of empirical studies.  So would the bishops drop their opposition if a study showed that children of gay couples can thrive under the criteria that generally apply to measure children's well-being, or would the bishops argue that the children of gay couples are, by the very nature of their environment, not capable of thriving?

Rob