Religious Liberty and LGBTQ Families

The right to discriminate is not religious freedom

My partner and I once took in a boy everyone else had given up on.

I’m a gay man and a former foster parent. I’ve written about Brent several times, about how the boy came into our lives unexpectedly, and how all three of us lead richer, more fulfilled lives because of the family we formed.

Brent would be the first person to tell you that he got lucky. He won the foster-parent lottery. The night his social worker drove him across town to our place through a blizzard, he had exactly zero options left.

It was either us or a detention facility — then maybe a group home at best. No loving family. No family who cared enough about him to advocate for him at school and do the hard parenting work kids need.

Lots of kids aren’t as fortunate as Brent, though.

Across the United States, many more children are waiting for permanent foster homes or adoptive families than there are families to take them. Some states agencies in the US describe the problem as a crisis. In many states, children sleep in offices and end up in institutions that essentially warehouse them.

Naturally, then, we should all be grateful that more and more LGBTQ people are ready and willing to step in and do their part — like my partner and I did. Well, you’d think that sort of gratitude would be natural, but in states where conservative Christians wield political power, you’d be wrong.

On May 3, evangelical Christians and Catholics in Oklahoma and Kansas succeeded in targeting LGBTQ foster and adoptive parents.

They teamed up to ensure that more children won’t find loving homes. Both states passed laws that permit religious organizations that do state-contracted child-welfare work to disqualify prospective parents on purely religious grounds.

The laws don’t mention LGBTQ people per se, but there’s no mystery involved. The legislation was introduced and passed as a result of intense lobbying by evangelical Christian and Catholic advocacy groups. They make no bones about their objective. They think it’s wrong to allow LGBTQ people to foster and adopt children.

They wish to continue to accept state money and do contract service work for the state while they discriminate against LGBTQ people and harm children. They’ve obtained the legal right to deprive children of loving homes on the bald grounds of religiously-based homophobic bigotry.

Children don’t have a choice about what service agency they’re assigned to. If luck of the draw assigns a child to an evangelical or Catholic agency, then with the new laws in place, that child can only be fostered or adopted by straight people. If no straight families are available?

Then the child goes without a home. Simple as that.

Now that religious zealots in Kansas and Oklahoma have succeeded in passing laws to deny children placement in homes with LGBTQ people, Republicans in Congress are attempting nationwide legislation, and the Trump Justice Department is arguing for the practice in federal court. Please read my story linked directly below to see how you can help foil that effort.

I have two important observations to make here.

First, these laws are unconstitutional on their face.

Agents of the state may not use religious tests in the course of public service. That’s clear cut. The ACLU is challenging the laws on exactly those grounds.

We Americans live in a liberal democracy, not a theocracy. Religious organizations don’t have the right to use their theology to set public policy. Children being cared for by the state have the right to be cared for equally, without respect to religiously-based discrimination.

A child should not have to be deprived of a home because a contracted agent of the state made an arbitrary decision based on religious doctrine.

There is no religious freedom problem here. Conservative Christians have every right to practice their religion as they see fit. They do not have a right to perform contract services for the state while demanding that state policy conform to their religious doctrines.

If an agency can’t provide services without discrimination, they are free not to bid for the contracts to provide those services.

Other states like Massachusetts enforce laws that require contracted child services agencies to treat LGBTQ people equally. In those states, no shortage of agencies has occurred. Some religious agencies have withdrawn from providing services, but secular ones have stepped up to take their place.

No problem.

As the ACLU notes, the shortage of foster and adoptive homes does not stem from a shortage of agencies, but from a shortage of families willing to take care of children.

Second, these laws demonstrate that conservative Christian claims to respect LGBTQ people are lies.

Just the other day, for example, a Catholic on Medium tried to defend his Church’s doctrines that label us LGBTQ people as “disordered” and “depraved.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he told me. “We’re on your side.”

We aren’t judging you. Everyone has issues. You’re taking offense where none is meant. You just don’t understand Catholic doctrine. Yes, we think you’re depraved, but you don’t really get what we mean by that. Chill. We’re cool about LGBTQ people. Really we are. Pinky swear.

OK, those aren’t the words he used. But that was his actual sentiment.

I call bullshit.

The Catholic Church in Oklahoma and Kansas lobbied hard and spent a fortune for the right to run child-welfare agencies with state money while disqualifying LGBTQ parents.

The official Church clearly means precisely what they teach people in the plain wording of their catechisms. They teach that we are “depraved,” disordered,” and “morally evil,” and they mean it. We’re not good enough in their estimation to take care of children. They can’t then pretend that everything is OK because they also say “respect those depraved people who shouldn’t be allowed to adopt children.”

It isn’t respect to tell us that we’re too immoral to be parents.

It isn’t anything like respect.

Evangelicals and the Catholic Church also demonstrate profound disrespect to the children who will be excluded from loving families because of religiously based homophobic bigotry.

So, let me conclude by once again demanding an end to the moral evil of religious homophobia.

It’s as immoral as religiously-based racist bigotry. And it must stop. If the Church had been in charge of Brent’s case, he’d have grown up in an institution.

I’m sure he’s thrilled that in the Canadian province of Quebec where we lived, the Catholic Church has been stripped of temporal power and political influence for generations.

No religious forces existed to lobby for his exclusion and to fight to keep him from a family that happened to be made up of two men. He got to have a parents and a stable, secure life.

Thank God.