When an adult or a couple adopts a child out of foster care in the state of Florida—which by definition means the couple is adopting a "special needs" child, a hard-to-place child, a child that wound up in the foster care due to abuse and neglect and, consequently, a child that is likely to have attachment issues and other disabilities—the state provides certain benefits for the child after placement. Most significantly health insurance, which may otherwise be very hard to obtain, along with college tuition credits and some other benefits. This helps make foster children easier to place and recognizes certain economic realities: by taking responsibility for a special-needs child, the adoptive parent isn't just doing something for a child—doing something profoundly loving for a child—but also doing a service to the state of Florida, i.e. alleviating the state of most of the expense of providing for the needs of a special-needs foster child.

So... Florida... adoption... regular readers of Slog probably know where this is headed. Wayne Smith, a gay man and a lawyer who lives in Key West and has been with his partner since 1988, was approved by the state to serve as a foster parent. Gay adoptions are illegal in Florida because the state believes that every child deserves a mother and a father... but since there aren't enough mothers and fathers out there who want to adopt... or serve as foster parents... the state allows gay men and lesbians to serve as foster parents but forbids them to adopt, thereby denying the foster children placed with gay couples the stability and security of a permanent home.

The state of Florida placed a five-year-old boy in Wayne Smith's home in 2001. The boy had "learning disabilities and other special needs," and Smith and has partner have been, according to social workers, exemplary parents. Smith sued to adopt the boy—now a teenager—and a judge approved the adoption and declared the state's ban on adoptions by gay people to be unconstitutional. The state allowed the adoption to be processed but then—citing technicalities—moved to deny Smith's son the benefits the state provides to all other children who have been adopted out of foster care. Smith had been declared the child's permanent guardian back 2006—something the state wanted because it helped the state meet federal guidelines for moving children from foster care to permanent placements—so the child wasn't actually in the foster care system when he was adopted, Florida insisted, and therefore Smith's son wasn't entitled to the same benefits as all other children adopted out of foster care. But Smith would have adopted his son if the state had allowed him to. His "permanent guardianship" was an adoption-in-everything-but-name that the state of Florida consented to because it allowed the state to reap the rewards—federal subsidies—for permanently placing the boy with Smith without having to actually allow Smith to adopt the boy.

Because, you see, allowing Smith to adopt the boy would be wrong... because every child deserves a mother and a father....even, presumably, a child that has been "permanently placed" with a gay couple. And after the adoption was mandated by a state judge, the state of Florida had to discriminate against this child—this special-needs, hard-to-place child, that the state placed with a gay man and his partner—to demonstrate its commitment to protecting children... from... um... from health insurance and college tuition?

With Smith gearing up to sue the state—a lawsuit he was likely to win—the state reversed course yesterday and will now provide Smith's son with the same benefits provided to children adopted by straight people and couples.

Florida's embattled ban on adoption by gay people suffered another setback Tuesday, when state child welfare administrators agreed to provide health insurance, college tuition and other benefits to the adopted son of a gay Key West man. For more than a year, the Department of Children & Families had refused to provide the adoption subsidy to the adoptive son of Wayne LaRue Smith, a Key West lawyer whose request to adopt a boy he was raising in foster care was approved by a Monroe County judge in the fall of 2008.

On Tuesday, DCF lawyers did an about-face, agreeing in writing to provide the boy with subsidized college tuition, health insurance under the state's Medicaid program, and other benefits typically provided to other children who are adopted from state care. "It means, finally, after 10 years, he gets what every other child in the same circumstance gets just by asking," Smith said of his now-teenaged son.

You have to love that lead: Florida's embattled gay adoption ban suffered another setback—man, almost makes you feel sorry for Florida's ban on gay adoptions. How it's suffered, huh?