Many states in fact already allow individuals who might be involved in gay relationships to adopt children, and several others permit the adoptive parent's partner, later on, to adopt the same child. In addition, certain court decisions have allowed gay couples, as couples, to adopt children, so even New Jersey's new standards are not wholly new. What the New Jersey settlement does, for the first time, is remove as a matter of state policy the fiction that the state is dealing with individuals rather than with a couple. More than anything else, the settlement is an acknowledgment of the current reality.