So the men, who have been together for 25 years, went to Oregon to jointly adopt Michael, now 10. The boy had been beaten and sexually abused, O'Reilly says, and refused to hug anyone for most of his four years in foster care.

"Nobody's stepping up to adopt" such hard-to-place children, says O'Reilly, 54, business manager for a children's theater company, "but they don't want us to adopt them."

Birtcher, 44, a hair salon owner, says there is a double standard. "Our prisons are full of people who were in foster care, and those people were in, quote unquote, straight family homes," he says. "If I can provide a loving, stable home for my little boy, that's the goal." (Vote: What do you think of gay) adoption?)

A bill introduced in the Ohio Legislature this month would bar all adoptions and foster care by gays and lesbians. It is among efforts in at least 16 states to put into law the view that children should be cared for only by a mother and a father or by heterosexual singles. (Related story: Gay adoption up in '08?)

In support of adoption by gays, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and adoption advocacy groups cite research that children with gay or lesbian parents fare as well as those raised in families with a mother and a father. Conservative groups such as Concerned Women for America say the research is flawed.

Children in foster care "are already scarred" by abuse and neglect, says Bill Maier, a child psychologist with the conservative Focus on the Family. "We would want to do everything we could to place them in the optimal home environment."

There are about 520,000 children in foster care, according to the North American Council on Adoptable Children in St. Paul. Of those, 120,000 are available for adoption, but only 50,000 find permanent homes each year.

"The child welfare system is already in crisis," said Rob Woronoff of the CWLA. "We don't have enough families as it is."

Actress and comedian Rosie O'Donnell, a foster parent in Florida who helped lead a failed effort in 2004 to overturn that state's ban on gay adoptions, said in an interview that gays and lesbians are often willing to take children that straight couples won't. She said she once cared for a girl who had been in 30 foster homes and who was later adopted by a friend.

"As a gay person, as a child, you kind of know what it's like to be the odd one out," said O'Donnell, a lesbian who has four adopted children, including one born to her partner, Kelli Carpenter O'Donnell. "To deny people the right to try to reach kids who are unreachable is wrong."

The government doesn't keep statistics on adoptions by gays and lesbians. Gary Gates, a UCLA demographer who studies gays and lesbians, analyzed 2000 Census data and estimates that about 250,000 children are being raised by same-sex couples and that 5% of those children, or 12,500, were adopted.

The push against adoption by lesbians and gay men comes after successful campaigns in 11 states in 2004 to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. At least six more states — Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin — may put marriage on the ballot in November.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said the U.S. Senate will vote again on a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in June. The House of Representatives passed such a measure two years ago.

"Marriage or any civil union has been declared unconstitutional (in Ohio), so why would they be able to adopt children?" asks the Rev. Russell Johnson, chairman of the Ohio Restoration Project, a conservative Christian group. "These people cannot reproduce. ... Experimenting on children through gay adoption is a problem."

Johnson led the fight in 2004 to get marriage on the ballot and vows to do the same with adoption this year if legislators don't act. The group plans to tout the adoption ban in a mailing to nearly 500,000 supporters in mid-March.

But if gay marriage unites most conservatives in opposition, gay adoption does not. Already, there are splits among Republicans.

"This is not an issue about gays," says Ohio House Speaker Jon Husted, a Republican, who was adopted as a child. "This is about children." Although he favored legislation to ban same-sex marriage in Ohio, he opposes the adoption bill and has no plans to schedule a hearing to discuss it.

Recent polling by Democratic consultant Peter Hart for the Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, also indicates the issue may not find favor among the general public. Asked about a constitutional amendment to ban adoptions by gays and lesbians, 58% of Missouri voters polled in November and 62% of Ohio voters this month said they would vote against it.

"Conservatives may well overreach if they try to ban gays from adopting children," Brookings Institution political analyst Thomas Mann says. "Americans have become more tolerant of same-sex relations, and this action may strike them as unnecessarily punitive."