Last week, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee okayed an amendment that sparked anger in the LGBTQ community because, advocates said, it could block lesbian and gay couples from adopting.
As Heron Greenesmith reports at Rewire, however, the proposed legislation doesn’t ban adoptions by same-sex couples outright. In fact, it could be far worse than that.
The amendment is the work of Republican Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama. It passed on a party-line vote. It would allow faith-based, taxpayer-funded adoption and other child welfare agencies to refuse to work with LGBTQ children or families if this conflicts with “the provider’s sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would be allowed to withhold as much as 15 percent of a state’s federal child-care funding if officials there fail to accede to an organization’s religiously based discrimination in foster care or adoption services.
Yes. You read that correctly. A state that refuses to go along with an organization’s religiously based discrimination against LGBTQ families based would see its federal funding docked. The upsidedownism of our era is less and less surprising, and more and more infuriating.
Especially since the latest nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court apparently has issues with separation of church and state, there’s always the possibility that, if Aderholt’s amendment passes the full House and Senate and gets signed by the squatter in the White House, the highest court in the land will approve it.
Greenesmith writes:
When you look at the full range of services that child welfare organizations provide to youth and families, you can instantly see the overwhelming negative implications of this legislation at a federal level.
Child welfare encompasses the set of services provided to families who are in crisis: counseling, therapy, and other programs for parents who need assistance parenting, for instance, or counseling and residential services for youth while their parents are working on becoming safer. Of the 440,000 children currently in the “foster system” in the United States right now, only one-quarter are awaiting an adoption placement with a non-family member. The vast majority of youth in the “system” are waiting to be reunited with their families, are waiting for placement with a non-parental family member, or are living in a residential facility with no goal of placement with a family.
The impact would be more far-reaching in some states than others.
For example, the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), an independent think tank that engages in research designed to speed equality for LGBTQ people, says nearly half of private agencies contracting with the state in Michigan are religiously affiliated. Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Michigan because two of those contracting agencies—Catholic Charities and Bethany Christian Services—refused to work with a lesbian couple seeking to adopt.
Ten states have laws on the books that permit licensed child welfare organizations and workers to discriminate in providing care. According to MAP, seven of those laws have been passed since the 2016 elections:
As MAP illustrated in a report late last year, the potential for abuse abounds. An agency could decide to practice conversion therapy on LGBTQ youth in its care, decline to provide appropriate mental and physical health care to transgender youth, or place LGBTQ youth in homes that will not honor their gender identity or sexual orientation. Nearly 25 percent of youth in foster care identify as LGBTQ.
Aderholt’s amendment has a long way to go and may not find as friendly an audience when it reaches the U.S. Senate. Violating human rights for religious reasons is no new thing in the United States and LGBTQ people have, of course, long been a target of such violations. The 29 members of the Appropriations Committee that voted to make such discrimination not merely acceptable but also to penalize states that try to stop it are political dinosaurs. The sooner they—and their like-minded comrades at the state and federal levels—are driven into extinction, the better.