Today, the San Francisco Department of Human Services is starting a campaign to recruit more [same-sex couples] to adopt foster kids, especially teens, who are among the hardest to place. The agency sees gays and lesbians as an underutilized pool of potential parents.

"We're always looking for adoptive homes for children, and we never have enough families," said Debby Jeter, deputy director for the city's Family and Children Services. "We believe same-sex couples have the ability to provide the same kind of family for a child as non-same-sex couples."

It's a tough time for foster agencies, which have to compete against international adoptions, in vitro procedures and surrogate mothers. So many prospective parents prefer babies and worry about the physical or mental needs of older foster children, who most often have landed in the system because they experienced neglect.

[SFDHS’s campaign] comes just two weeks after the evangelical Christian group Focus on the Family began its drive to recruit more Christians as adoptive parents, partly -- the group said -- to keep foster children out of homosexual hands.

Focus on the Family's objection to same-sex parents is grounded in interpretation of biblical scripture and research by Paul Cameron, director of the Family Research Institute in Colorado. Cameron says gays and lesbians are unfit parents, are more likely to molest children of their same sex, switch partners frequently, have shorter life expectancies and cause their children embarrassment and social difficulties.

"Any child that can be adopted into a married-mother-and-father family, that's the gold standard," Cameron said. "An orphanage would be the second choice, and then a single woman."

California is among a handful of states where sexual orientation cannot be a basis for preventing someone from adopting. On the other hand, Florida forbids "homosexuals" from adopting, Mississippi bans "same-gender" couples from adopting, Utah bans fostering and adoption by all unmarried couples and Nebraska has a policy prohibiting gay people from fostering.

In San Francisco, gay men and lesbians already adopt a large share of the foster children who are not adopted by relatives -- 88 percent since last July, for example, according to Dan Kelly with the Human Services Department.

"It's easier for me (to have two dads) than growing up on my own.”