Public Norms and Gay Adoption

Thanks to Rick for his thoughtful response on John Garvey's op-ed.  It seems to me that the state can link its anti-discrimination requirement for adoption to child welfare.  The state has an interest in the make-up of the pool of potential adoptive parents, and this interest is different than its interest in the make-up of the pool of other service providers.  Many goods and services are fungible; parents are not.  If a pharmacy decides not to dispense Plan B, for example, the same product is available elsewhere, and the state licensing program's beneficiary (i.e., the pharmaceutical consumer) has lost only the time it takes to travel to another pharmacy.  But if an organization decides to exclude same-sex couples, as a category, from the parenting pool, isn't there an impact on the quality of the pool?  If a couple that might otherwise be best suited for a particular unwanted child is excluded, hasn't the state licensing program's beneficiary (i.e., the child) suffered a loss even if other adults ultimately step forward?

Assume that a private adoption agency decided that whites are the most suitable parents and thus follows a policy of never placing children with non-white couples.  Doesn't the state have an interest -- beyond the symbolic quality of the exclusion -- of ensuring that children have the benefit of a parenting pool that is constructed according to the public's judgment of appropriate parenting criteria, rather than the agency's racially biased criteria?  Should the answer change if the racially biased criteria are grounded in religious beliefs?

All that said, I'm inclined to agree with Rick on this particular case because my guess is that Massachusetts is much more concerned with the symbolic dimension of Catholic Charities' exclusion than with any real impact on the quality of the parenting pool; I'm simply suggesting that the enforcement of public norms in adoption may have a firmer foundation than in other contexts where religious organizations are forced to toe the secular line.

Rob