A DIFFERENT FATHERS' DAY

By John Cloud

The Holden-Galluccio household in suburban Maywood, N.J., is unremarkable in most respects. There's oatmeal with bananas at breakfast, then preschool for Adam, 2, regular feedings for his one-year-old foster sister and bedtime stories when Dad returns from a long day at his telecommunications job. Dad No. 1, that is: Jon Holden and Michael Galluccio are a Ward and June Cleaver for the '90s, gay partners whose yearning for a traditional family of sorts--Dad, Dad and the kids--may have just transformed the battle for gay equality.

Last week New Jersey became the first state to explicitly allow lesbian and gay couples to adopt children jointly, just as married couples do. The state agreed to change its policy after Holden, Galluccio and a group of 200 other gay couples brought a lawsuit arguing that New Jersey's no-gay-couples rule violated both state law and their right to equal protection. Previously, gays in the state could adopt only as individuals, forcing couples to undertake the lengthy and expensive adoption process twice. Now, all unmarried couples, gay and straight, can adopt.

The new court-affirmed agreement, which resulted from settlement talks between state officials and the American Civil Liberties Union, contains some of the strongest gay-rights language ever approved by a state. While most pro-gay legislation has banned job and housing discrimination against gays, the adoption agreement enters more fraught territory. It not only says gay couples must be treated as full equals with straight couples but does so in the delicate arena of child rearing. Although most Americans oppose discrimination against lesbians and gays, the country has been less certain that they should be allowed to marry and adopt. Last year Congress passed a bill dubbed the Defense of Marriage Act, which said each state could choose whether to recognize gay marriages; 25 states have banned them outright. In this context, says Elizabeth Birch, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a gay lobbying group, "this [New Jersey policy] is a vitally important agreement. The next stage of the gay-rights movement will focus on all of these issues dealing with our families."

To be sure, Holden and Galluccio aren't the first American gay partners to adopt jointly. Judges in other states, including California, have quietly allowed such adoptions in the past, according to the A.C.L.U.'s Michael Adams, the point man on the New Jersey case. And according to a 1996 report by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a gay legal-rights group, courts in 21 states have approved so-called second-parent adoptions, or adoptions by the partners of individuals who have given birth to or who have already adopted a child. (This was the lengthy double-adoption procedure that Holden and Galluccio rejected.) Courts in Colorado and Wisconsin have disallowed such adoptions; New Hampshire and Florida prohibit any adoptions by gays, even individuals. There have been no rulings in the other states.

Still, in practice, adoption policy is almost always made case by case, and sympathetic judges--in the U.S., every adoption must be sanctioned by a judge--can allow just about any arrangement. William Pierce, president of the National Council for Adoption in Washington, estimates that "thousands" of individual gays have adopted over the past 20 years. Many more gay parents, perhaps millions, are rearing their own biological offspring.

It's unclear how much the New Jersey agreement will change adoption law elsewhere. In fact, there's a chance that the New Jersey case could do for adoption policy what a Hawaii case did for marriage: ignite a national backlash. Lower-court decisions in Hawaii allowing same-sex marriages led other states and eventually Congress to pass the bills outlawing them. (The Hawaii Supreme Court will probably rule on the issue soon, but next year Hawaii's voters will have a chance to amend their constitution to ban same-sex marriages.) The New Jersey case, says Arne Owens, a spokesman for the Christian Coalition, "will serve as a wake-up call to people, because what we see is another effort by the homosexual lobby to advance their agenda, and here they're doing it on the backs of children. Traditional family arrangements are proven to work." Gay groups countered with an American Psychological Association study concluding that children of gay parents turn out no better or worse than children of heterosexuals.

Last week's bickering meant little to Adam, the two-year-old who started it all. Born addicted to cocaine and suffering from a respiratory virus and a weak liver, his chief concern last week was trying to open some of the Christmas presents crammed under the tree. Having finalized his adoption in October, Holden, 34, and Galluccio, 35, plan to adopt their foster daughter as well. Of Adam, Holden said last week, "he has had two physical parents, two psychological parents, two emotional parents. The only things we weren't were his two legal parents." Now Adam has those as well.

--With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York