Victory for Families

www.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/opinion/27mon3.html

This article was published in the New York Times, September 26, 2010, referring the issue of gay couples and adoption, through an example of a gay man from the state of Florida, who is trying to adopt two brothers from whom he was already their foster parent. Happily for Mr. Gill and his family, his case declared unconstitutional an over 30-year-old law that banned gay people from adoption in a state appeals court in Florida.

Before we focus on the analysis of the argument, it is important to understand the difference between foster care and adoption. Foster care is a temporary situation, where a child lives with a foster family because he/she cannot live with his/her bith family for reasons such as abuse, neglect, the death of birth parents, etc. In the other hand, adoption is a permanent situation where a child becomes part of a family where the parents have the same responsibilities and rights as if they were the child's birth parents.

Now that the difference between foster care and adoption has been clarified, the following passage is the part of the article that I am going to focus on:

The state had nothing credible to offer to justify the adoption ban. It presented only two expert witnesses noted Gerald Cope Jr., who wrote the main opinion. One witness undercut the state's case by saying adoption decisions should be made on a case-by-case basis. Opposing experts quickly discredited the state's second witness, Dr. George Rekers, a Baptist minister and clinical psychologist (subsequently caught up on a sex scandal) whose pseudo-scientific research was laughable.

The argument that the writer of this article is making is that there is no compelling evidence that gay people wouldn't be good parents; therefore gay people should not be banned from adoption.

The structure of this argument would be as follows:

Premise: There is no compelling evidence that gay people wouldn't be good parents.
Conclusion: Gay people should not be banned from adoption.

At a first look this argument may seem to commit a fallacy of defective induction. Because there was no evidence to "justify the adoption ban" in the case of Mr. Gill, then he should not be banned from adopting children. Someone might consider this an argument from ignorance (ad ignorantiam) which is a fallacy where some conclusion is claimed to be true because there was no compelling evidence that it was false.

In general, if some claim was conluded to be true because there was no evidence to prove that it was false, it would be consider an argument from ignorance. However, in this particular situation it is not the case. For example, if there is no sufficient or no evidence at all that someone is guilty of murder, then you cannot send that person to jail. Similarly, in the case of Mr. Gill, there was no evidence to prove the adoption ban; therefore he could not be prohibited from adopting the two children.

In conclusion based on my previous analysis, I believe this argument is in "Moderate Condition." It seems to commit a fallacy of defective induction where someone might considered it an argument from ignorance. However, if we look at it more carefully, in the context of this article the argument does not commit a fallacy, therefore by that minor clarification it could be considered as "Healthy."