President promises to help faith-based adoption agencies
WASHINGTON — At Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Donald Trump introduced a family he called “inspiring to us all” — the Bucks from Michigan, who have adopted five children.
Trump pivoted from warmly praising the Bucks’ “beautiful” children, including 10-year-old Max and 9-year-old Liz who attended the breakfast, to a darker note: “Unfortunately, the Michigan adoption agency that brought the Buck family together is now defending itself in court for living by the values of its Catholic faith.”
“My administration,” he promised to the room full of religious leaders, most of them conservative Christians, “is working to ensure that faithbased adoption agencies are able to help vulnerable children find their forever families while following their deeply held beliefs.”
The president did not explain how the administration is helping these agencies or why they are being challenged before moving on to discuss international religious persecution, the U.S. border and the survival of a premature baby named Grayson. But it is a long-running question for policymakers: whether adoption and fostercare agencies run by religious groups, but funded by the fedwith eral government, should be allowed to pick the homes in which they place children based on the religion and sexuality of the parents.
Some agencies, citing their religious beliefs, refuse to place children in the homes of samesex couples. Others will place children only with Christian parents.
Some state laws specifically grant agencies the right to refuse same-sex parents. That’s the case in Michigan, where the Bucks adopted their five children. That policy faces a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.
On a national level, the debate centers on a regulation put in place by the Obama administration days before he left office. Programs that receive federal funding through the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the Obama administration rule, are barred from discriminating on the basis of religion, gender identity or sexual orientation. The rule specifically says that under the Supreme Court’s decision that legally recognized same-sex marriage nationwide, “all recipients must treat as valid the marriages of same-sex couples.”
A South Carolina adoption agency that works only with Christian parents — turning away a Jewish mother who wanted to become a foster parent — petitioned for an exemption from the HHS rule, the support of South Carolina’s Republican governor. The department said yes to the request for an exemption in late January.
That HHS decision prompted outcries from advocates of same-sex parents and religious pluralism, who feared the spread of exemptions for Christian organizations to flout federal rules.
Leslie Cooper, who works on LGBT issues for the ACLU, said that the attorney general of Texas has asked for a waiver similar to South Carolina’s, and other states across the country could follow suit. “We can’t afford to have good families cast aside based on a religious test,” she said.
When Catholic adoption agencies once stopped operating in locations including the District of Columbia and Massachusetts because of their opposition to gay parents, Cooper said, “other agencies seamlessly took over that work, including faith-based agencies. ... The problem isn’t a shortage of agencies. The problem is a shortage of families. And allowing agencies ... to turn away lovely families — that only makes the shortage of families a bigger problem.”
On the other hand, some Christian advocates said HHS should go even further and revoke the Obama rule entirely, so that no foster-care agencies are obligated to follow the nondiscrimination rule.