Today I have a piece in USA Today addressing the questions surrounding legal challenges to faith-based adoption agencies.
Here’s an excerpt:
Of all of the issues our nation faces today, adoption should be one of the least controversial. People of all political persuasions can agree it is very important to see children in need of loving parents placed in a home that will cherish them and allow them to flourish as individuals. Unfortunately, the issue is not so simple these days.
Recently, several states have introduced laws that would limit the ability of faith-based organizations to provide child welfare services, such as adoption and foster care. In Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., for example, faith-based child welfare providers have faced loss of funding, denial of contracts and other forms of discrimination for operating according to their religiously informed convictions. This is unacceptable, not only from a religious liberty perspective, but also for the impact it will have on children in need of adoption and related services.
With the current state of adoption and foster care in our nation today, we need as many people working to facilitate these services as possible. Instead, what I am seeing is a concerted effort to shut down service providers, because they hold disfavored religious views. Whenever a service provider is forced to close their doors due to their religious convictions, a heavier burden is placed on an already overtaxed system. We need to put the politics aside and think about what is best for the thousands of children awaiting adoption. The more providers we have, the more capacity we have to get these children into their “forever homes.”
Read the entire piece here.
