Human Rights at Home and Abroad: Past, Present, and Future

estimated 14,100 foster children are living with lesbian or gay parents. Gay and lesbian
parents are raising three percent of foster children in the United States. (2010)
These four findings prove that the United States is improving in the ability of homosexuals to adopt and
foster the many children that need a home. The government is allowing these willing individuals to give a
child or children a warm and loving home. On the other hand, even with this progression there are still
―three states that currently restrict GLB (Gay Lesbian and Bi) individuals or couples from adopting‖,
according to Badgett and his fellow authors (2010). Because these three states are still discriminating
GLB individuals and couples from adopting probably means that other states might be thinking the same
thing and might even consider going back to their old ways of discrimination. States compare themselves
to one another in seeing how governments are being run and how it affects its citizens. States want to see
both the good and bad aspects of the other governments to make changes to their own in order to make it
better. This could mean states changing their own laws to make themselves a better place, so why
wouldn‘t they think about changing laws/rights for homosexuals. Undoubting, with new rights being
given to homosexuals that were once denied, this had added more fuel to the fire so to speak. Gay rights
become more controversial with every change made and don‘t seem to be stopping any time soon. In
comparison, the United Kingdom has had problems with homosexuals being able to be parents.
According to Helen Cosis Brown and Shelia Kershaw, ―the notion that lesbians and gay men, because of
their sexual preference, were unsuitable to parent‖ (2008, p. 123). Gays and lesbians had problems
adopting children and being denied the ability to donate eggs and sperm to fertility clinics. These issues
have developed due to some citizens not believing that homosexuals had the ability to parent. This was
the main concern for those individuals. This idea was thought because only one sex was available to be a
parent (either two moms or two dads) and not one of each sex to parent the child. In their minds this type
of family was not capable of raising a child because children need both a mom and a dad and without one
or the other a child would not grow up ‗normal‘. Homosexuals were denied that ability to adopt and foster
children because of their sexual orientation and not their abilities to parent. Brown and Kershaw of the
U.K. report:
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