In light of a federal court letting stand a Florida law banning gay adoption stand this week, Maggie Gallagher looks at state adoption laws and notes that only two states have a codified preference for married couples as adoptive parents. She reports from an upcoming study out of her think tank that finds that, in fact, discrimination worries may rank higher than an mom and a dad in terms of placement considerations:

States are twice as likely to “forbid ‘discrimination’ based on marital status than to make any legal effort to place vulnerable children in homes with a married mother and father.”