The Rekers effect: How the choice of anti-gay adoption "expert" Dr. George Rekers backfired on Bill McCollum

That led the Orlando Sentinel to write in an editorial, “The dearth of credible experts to defend the ban should have told the attorney general something. Reputable studies have shown parents’ quality, not their sexual orientation, is what counts.”

Even some Republican admirers of McCollum, like GOP attorney general candidate Holly Benson, have been unable to defend McCollum in this instance. “Attorney General McCollum trusted his team to identify the best possible expert. They made a mistake. A bad mistake.”

But in fact it’s been reported that McCollum overruled his own staff in selecting Rekers. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s Gary Fineout reported that Assistant Attorney General Valerie Martin wrote in a July 2007 e-mail that, after talking to Arkansas officials and reviewing the background of the former University of South Carolina professor, she would recommend not using Rekers.

Democrat Alex Sink, who says she is against the gay adoption ban, calls McCollum’s personal intervention “another example of Bill McCollum using his office and the taxpayers’ money to advance his own political agenda.”

Nadine Smith of Equality Florida says the recent Rekers scandal has been good news for foes of the gay adoption ban in that it’s caused a lot of people to ask, ”This is the best you can find to defend this law?” and has prompted people to reconsider why Florida stands virtually alone in banning gay adoption.

Perhaps momentum is now on the side of those who want to rid the state of the ban. In April an Arkansas circuit court judge declared that state’s unmarried couples adoption and foster law unconstitutional. Judge Chris Piazza’s ruling read in part that “it is especially troubling that one politically unpopular group has been specifically targeted for exclusion by the Act.”