(Miami, Florida) A second legal challenge began Wednesday in a Miami courtroom to Florida’s ban on gays adopting children.

The Florida legislature adopted the law during Anita Bryant’s infamous anti-gay crusade in 1977. The bill’s sponsor in the state Senate told a local newspaper at the time that the law was intended to send this message to lesbians and gay men: “[we] are really tired of you. We wish you’d go back in the closet.”

The case involves two boys – half brothers – and their openly gay foster father, Frank Gill. The boys have been with Gill since 2004, when he was approached for help by a state child abuse investigator.

The placement was supposed to be temporary, but three years later, the boys and Gill have become a family, and now they want to ensure the children will not be removed at some point from his care.

”I tried to make them feel, from the beginning, like they had a permanent home,” Gill told The Miami Herald in an interview.

He said he told the boys: “I’ll be your daddy; it doesn’t matter what happens, I’ll always be your daddy.”

Today Gill and lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union asked Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman to overturn the ban on gay adoption and award him permanent custody.

An attorney appointed by Lederman to represent the children said in a report to the court that the children refer Gill and his partner as “dad” and that Gill should be granted the adoption.

“Upon my visit to the home, I observed the minor children to be happy, healthy, well-adjusted, well-groomed, polite and energetic kids,” the report said. A court-appointed guardian also recommended that Gill be allowed to adopt the boys.

The Florida Department of Children & Families and the state attorney general’s office say the ban should be maintained. The position has the support of Gov. Charlie Crist (R) who said he has no plans to have the law repealed.

The case was argued behind closed doors with a written ruling to be issued at a later date.

The case comes less than a month after another South Florida judge ruled against the law in another challenge.

That case involved a 13-year-old boy who had been fostered by a gay Key West man since 2001. Monroe Circuit Court Judge David J. Audlin Jr. said in his ruling that the gay adoption ban violates the Constitution’s separation of powers by preventing family court and child welfare judges from deciding case-by-case what is best for a child.

”Contrary to every child welfare principle the gay adoption ban operates as a conclusive or irrebuttable presumption that . . . it is never in the best interest of any adoptee to be adopted by a homosexual,” he wrote.

In 2004, a federal appeals court upheld Florida’s ban on gay adoption. In a written ruling, the court rejected a challenge by four gay men to the law.

“We exercise great caution when asked to take sides in an ongoing public policy debate, such as the current one over the compatibility of homosexual conduct with the duties of adoptive parenthood,” wrote Judge Stanley Birch.

“The state of Florida has made the determination that it is not in the best interests of its displaced children to be adopted by individuals who ‘engage in current, voluntary homosexual activity’ and we have found nothing in the Constitution that forbids this policy judgment.”

The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

Attempts to repeal the law have failed several times in the legislature.