Public Discourse recently published an excellent article by Elizabeth Kirk entitled “Forcing Faith-Based Organizations out of Adoption and Foster Care Hurts Children,” at http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/10/20199/. She highlights a recent lawsuit by the ACLU to stop states from allowing children to be fostered or adopted by parents of faith. While the ACLU and its supporters claim to be concerned about children in the child welfare system with a desire to protect children’s gender identity, those efforts, however, actually work to drain resources needed to help children, and do nothing to address any actual problems or needs in foster care. We have written about how Obergefell harms women’s relationships with their children, an important unexpected problem, but Kirk points out how expanding marriage has actually limited options for children. She writes:
“In the wake of Obergefell, and given the increasing number of sexual orientation non-discrimination laws, many states (including Michigan, Virginia, Texas, and South Dakota) have passed legislation to make clear that faith-based child welfare organizations may continue to provide services to families and children as they always have done, without sacrificing religious beliefs, such as the notion that the best placement for a child is with a married mother and father. This belief is indeed a theological one, but it is also an anthropological one, supported by millennia of human experience, and a scientific one, supported by sound, contemporary social science.”
Children need parents who are ready to love and care for them, to restore them to a family, not organizations and ideologies that will limit unnecessarily who can care for them. Ms. Kirk summarizes the problem well:
“Driving out those child welfare providers that have been at the forefront of caring for children for centuries fails to respect the rich and diverse religious pluralism of our nation. Their absence will not benefit same-sex couples, but it will harm children.”
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