An unprecedented experiment.

Your editorial on Catholic Charities of Boston and adoption by gay and lesbian parents faults both the bishops and the Massachusetts legislature. Are the bishops "gravely misguided" as you claim? I believe a negative answer can be found in the editors' failure to draw logical conclusions from this statement: "Same-sex marriage is an unprecedented social experiment and its long-term effects on children are not yet known." In other words, you admit that adoption by same-sex parents is an experiment on foster children. And you justify it on the basis that more kids will be helped--even though you're not sure that's true. This argument neglects the first rule: "Do no harm." Don't foster children have moral claims on us? These children cannot honestly be said to give free and informed consent to this experiment. After all, they are children. Who qualifies to give proxy consent on their behalf? Surely not the state, the legal caretaker, which has failed all too often in its duties. In my two decades as head of Girls and Boys Town, I saw thousands of children neglected and abused, many of whom were in the care of the state. I believe the church's view is correct that we should not subject these children to the further indignity of making them experimental subjects in an adult debate about gay marriage.

In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to Florida's ban on adoption by gays and lesbians. That ban had previously been upheld by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Writing for the appeals court, Judge Stanley F. Birch said that it is not "irrational for the legislature to proceed with deliberate caution before placing adoptive children in an alternative, but unproven, family structure that has not yet been conclusively demonstrated to be equivalent to the marital family structure that has established a proven track record spanning centuries." I have always been troubled by the fact that people would eagerly subject foster children to this kind of experimentation while exempting their own children from it.

(REV.) VAL J. PETER

Boys Town, Neb.

The writer is executive director emeritus of Girls and Boys Town.