Forcing Faith-Based Organizations Out of Foster Care and Adoption Hurts Children

What does a bigot look like?  According to a recent ad created by the Movement Advancement Project (“MAP”), bigots are lurking in child welfare organizations disguised as seemingly normal social workers. Beneath their kind exteriors, these people conceal a dark agenda to force gay or transgender children into conversion therapy, to impose corporal punishment with a leather belt, and to allow children to languish in foster care rather than be adopted by gay couples. The ad concludes with the dire warning, “When states allow decisions to be based on a worker’s individual beliefs, rather than the best interests of children, it’s children who pay the price.”

What is going on here? Are rogue child welfare workers stealthily imposing private prejudices on the children in their care?

In short: no. In reality, the situation is something quite guileless. 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.