As gay marriage opponents guard the traditional legal boundaries of adult relationships, Arkansas child welfare officials are defending a policy that denies abused and neglected children relationships with supportive foster families.

And the rest of the country is watching. Last month, Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Tim Fox began hearing arguments in the ACLU's constitutional challenge against the Arkansas Child Welfare Agency Review Board, the governor-appointed body that oversees the licensing requirements for state child welfare agencies. For the last five years, the board has categorically banned gay individuals and couples from becoming foster parents in a requirement it claims is designed to protect children from disease, violence, sexual abuse, neglect and instability. Only Nebraska has a similar prohibition on gay foster parents.

But the ban doesn't stop there.

Tucked in between the guidelines for tuberculosis tests and foster parent training is the review board's provision that no person may serve as a foster parent if any adult member of that person's household is a homosexual.

This far-reaching prohibition excludes, for example, Rev. Matthew Lee Howard and his partner of 20 years, Craig Stoopes, two of the plaintiffs in the ACLU case, from becoming foster parents. It also applies to William Wagner, who, along with his wife of thirty years, provides emergency shelter for teens who have been kicked out of their homes because they are gay. In a state and nation with a chronic shortage of qualified foster families, the Wagners cannot officially serve as foster parents because their adult son, who is gay, regularly stays with them.

This mean-spirited and discriminatory policy is a bitter pill for prospective foster parents, but it is most harmful to the children seeking refuge from abuse and neglect.

In Arkansas, approximately 2,959 children have been removed from troubled homes and placed in state care. Many of these abused and neglected children are placed with foster families who help them work through complex issues of family violence, substance abuse, and other serious problems. In addition to providing a temporary safe haven, many foster families choose to adopt children who cannot return home safely. In fact, about 69 percent of the children adopted from the U.S. child welfare system are adopted by their foster parents. And while Arkansas does not ban adoptions by gay people, like Florida and Mississippi, its foster care restrictions create a fundamental obstacle for the almost 800 Arkansas children waiting for adoptive homes.

The Arkansas policy also sends a particularly cruel message to gay teens in foster care, many of whom have already been rejected by their parents because of their sexual orientation.

In a study of 14 states, including those with the largest foster care populations, Lambda Legal, a national civil rights organization, found that none of the state child welfare agencies surveyed had instituted policies that prohibit discrimination against gay foster care youth or required training for child welfare staff or foster parents on sensitivity to gay youth. Since then, California has been the only state to develop policies in this area. Across the country, teenagers in care have reported widespread discrimination and abuse by adults responsible for their well-being from physical and verbal harassment to mandatory conversion therapy. Arkansas licensing standards only serve to compound the alienation and abuse these young people already experience.

It is particularly difficult to understand the Child Welfare Review Board's unwillingness to reconsider the policy in the face of well-substantiated protests from qualified Arkansas foster parents, Arkansas child welfare officials and caseworkers, including the former head of the Arkansas Division of Child and Family Services, and such nationally respected child advocacy groups as the Child Welfare League of America, the North American Council on Adoptable Children and the American Psychological Association, all of whom oppose the use of sexual orientation as criteria for foster care and adoptive placements.

Instead of simply admitting its mistake, however, the review board has chosen to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees to litigate the ACLU's equal protection case, precious resources that would be better spent in support of its overwhelmed and under-funded state child welfare system.

To add insult to injury, the federal government has remained shamefully silent on this misguided policy. In a recent federal performance review of Arkansas' child welfare agency, evaluators specifically analyzed the quality of the state's foster and adoptive parent licensing, recruitment and retention programs, but failed to mention the discriminatory policy's potential impact on children-a particularly egregious oversight in view of the approximately $46 million in federal funding for child welfare services Arkansas receives each year.

In his classic poem on racial discrimination, Langston Hughes wrote: "I am the American heartbreak / The rock on which Freedom stumped its toe." In stubbornly maintaining the sweeping ban on gay foster parents and others, Arkansas' child welfare licensing officials have found a new way to trip over themselves and, in the process, hurt the very children they are charged to protect.