Full Miami Herald article here. (Photo: CARL JUSTE / MIAMI HERALD)
A North Miami gay man began a court fight Wednesday to adopt two children he and his partner have cared for since 2004 through the state's foster program.
The trial, between Frank Martin Gill and the state's Department of Children & Families, is closed because it deals with an adoption. A Miami Herald reporter was asked to leave the courtroom at Miami's Juvenile Justice Center.
Gill never set out to smash Florida's gay adoption law. A foster parent, Gill took two half-brothers into his North Miami home in 2004 when a child abuse investigator asked for his help. It was supposed to be temporary.
But weeks turned into months, and then years. Gill and the two boys became a family.
Now, a month after a Key West judge declared Florida's gay adoption law unconstitutional in a separate but narrow case, Gill and a team of lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union will present a new challenge to Florida's 31-year-old law that forbids gay people from adopting. . . .
In Florida, gay people can foster children, but they cannot adopt. Although the Key West ruling declared the law unconstitutional, it was not appealed to a higher court, so its significance as legal precedent remains weak.
On Wednesday, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman will begin a trial over Gill's petition to adopt the two half-siblings. Their mother and respective fathers lost their rights to raise them in 2006. . . .
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