Sir, We write to express our disappointment at the letter of the archbishops of Canterbury and York arguing in favour of an opt-out clause for Roman Catholic adoption agencies from the proposed anti-discrimination legislation. Adoption law clearly states that the interests of the child must come first. The proposed regulations do not undermine that principle but in fact increase the potential range of suitable adoptive parents.

In recasting the debate as one touching on religious conscience, the archbishops have obscured this fact and introduced an ideological red herring where only the interests of children should be in discussion. Clearly, there are cases where those will be best served in the stable home of a loving and committed same-sex couple. This is why Anglican, Jewish and other faith-based agencies are happy to comply. All the archbishops have achieved is once more to give the impression that to be Christian is to be anti-gay.

We, and many supporters of our movement, wish that their contribution to our public debate had been to highlight the more open attitude of Anglicans rather than to defend the narrowness of others.

THE REV CANON NERISSA JONES
Chair of Trustees, Affirming Catholicism

THE REV RICHARD JENKINS
Director, Affirming Catholicism

Sir, I am a gay adoptive dad who also attempts to be a practising Christian and to bring my son up with some sense of the breadth of the love of God — wider than the breadth admitted by Westminster or Canterbury, it seems.

In Rowan Williams’s letter (report, Jan 24) he writes: “It is vitally important that the interests of vulnerable children are not relegated to suit any political interest.” True, but that’s the point. Children who need adoptive parents deserve the widest possible pool of potential mums and dads.

This is not the adoption constituency of the 1950s — cuddly newborn babies in white woollies. Most children now available for adoption have unhappy and complex histories. Many classic adoptive couples — by which I mean infertile heterosexual couples in their late thirties — find the dissonance between the fantasy of the natural babe in arms and the reality of the hurt, challenging six-year-old too great to face. Older children are difficult to place for adoption for precisely this reason.

In contrast, single adopters and same-sex couples often seem able to accept the troubled complexity of the older adopted child: confused but powerful birth attachments, the need for continuing birth family contact, the ambiguity of the parental role for an older adopted child.

I do not consider my role as a parent to have anything to do with political interest. It has everything to do with consistent, unequivocal love and care for my adopted son. I have yet to meet a lesbian or gay adoptive parent for whom this statement would not be true.

PATRICK PALMER
London N5

Sir, As an adoptive parent I can attest to the extraordinary confusion that adopted children may suffer. They have to find answers to some very difficult questions about their history. They also may face bullying of the kind that my son suffered at his previous school: “He’s a loser — he hasn’t got real parents.”

Why should anyone, let alone the Catholic Church, want to add further complexity and anxiety to the existence of those who are already vulnerable, by giving them the problem of explaining to themselves and others why they have same sex parents?

MICHAEL PORTER
Fawsley, Northants

Sir, We were advised by the Government that enacting the human rights legislation brought us into line with the rest of Europe. How do the Churches elsewhere in Europe accommodate the obligations under human rights laws to outlaw sex discrimination in respect of their charitable works?

CHRIS SANDERS
Amersham, Bucks

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