Anti gay adoption articles
Same-Sex Couple Adoption Laws
Some of the most difficult cases that have come before courts in recent years involve potential conflicts between First Amendment religious rights and the right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Religous groups hold won exemptions to laws due to First Amendment
In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, 573 U.S. ____ (2014), the U.S. Supreme Court commanded that the Religious Freedom Restoration Behave (RFRA) of 1993, which has subsequently been supplemented with the Religious Country Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA), exempted a closely held for-profit enterprise from providing contraceptives under the Affordable Care Act when such provision violated the owners’ religious beliefs.
Similarly, in a fairly slim ruling, the Supreme Court decided in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, 584 U.S. ____ (2018), that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had denigrated a baker’s sincerely held religious beliefs when judgment that he had violated the commandment in refusing to make a custom cake for a same-sex wedding.
Ruling on same-sex marriage has led to conflicts over adoption subsidies
One of the l
For years, Dietz Osborne and his colleagues at Miriam’s Promise adoption agency in Nashville, Tenn. had silently worked with LGBTQ+ couples looking to adopt children. It was not something the United Methodist-affiliated agency advertised or promoted, but when a same-gender couple came to them, Miriam’s Promise unassumingly welcomed them as clients.
Then, in January 2020, the Tennessee legislature passed a law allowing foster and adoption agencies to cite religious conviction as a reason to refuse to place children with LGBTQ+ families. Osborne is the president and CEO of Miriam’s Guarantee, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and father himself. He felt it was time for the small agency to perform more.
“I went to the board and said, ‘Now is the time,’” Osborne said, recalling his thrust for Miriam’s Promise to become publicly and proactively inclusive of LGBTQ+ families, effectively taking a stay against the discriminatory bill. Knowing that the six-person staff felt similarly, he told the board, “If we don’t, you might be looking for a whole new staff.”
READ MORE: Asexual and Aromantic People Are Often Forgotten, But God Sees Us
The board agreed, and things started altering immed
Adoption and the Anti-discrimination Wars
STEPHANIE BARCLAY: I want to start with some first principles that I imagine many of us can agree with. Number one: gay couples can be fantastic parents and should not be banned from adopting or fostering children. Number two: there’s a shortage of foster and adoptive homes for foster children. And number three: our policy decisions should ultimately be aimed at what is best for these children, who have suffered so much.
There are 400,000 children right now in foster care nationally, and of those, 100,000 are just waiting to be adopted. Every year, about 20,000 foster children age out, which means that they leave foster care not having been able to find a permanent family. Studies show that these children, who are predominantly minority children, are more likely to end up in poverty.
I also desire to clarify the difference between public and secret adoption. With private adoption, the paradigmatic example is a teen mother giving up her child voluntarily. That’s very different from what we’re going to spend most of our time talking about, and that is public adoption, where children have been removed from their homes because they hav
Adoption agency should be able to reject gay couples, Trump administration argues
The Trump administration submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on Wednesday arguing that a taxpayer-funded nonprofit should be proficient to refuse to work with gay couples and others whom the team considers to be in violation of its religious beliefs.
The brief was filed by the Department of Justice in the case Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, which centers on the refusal of Catholic Social Services, a religious nonprofit that operates a child welfare agency in Philadelphia, to place adoptive and foster children with same-sex couples in violation of the city’s nondiscrimination ordinance.
In its little, the government argued that “Philadelphia has impermissibly discriminated against religious exercise,” and that the city’s actions “reflect unconstitutional hostility toward Catholic Social Services’ religious beliefs.”
The latter argument cites a recent Supreme Court case in which the government intervened on behalf of baker Jack Phillips who refused to bake a wedding cake for a homosexual couple due to his religious values. The high court awarded a constricted victory to Phillips on the grounds that th
Same-Sex Adoption: Why Not
It’s not wise to use phrases like “children need a mother and a father.” Some people will ponder you’re equating having opposite-sex parents with a hereditary need like food or shelter. They might signal to studies or anecdotal accounts of children raised by same-sex couples who “turned out just fine.”
In some contexts, you might find it helpful to point out the flaws in studies that purport to prove that queer households are just as good as, if not superior to, opposite-sex couples. Some of the flaws include the fact that respondents (usually only a handful of them) volunteered for these studies, so the more obviously dysfunctional same-sex couples didn’t bother applying in the first place. However, this approach can get you off the main moral concept too quickly and muddy the waters into debates about whether certain groups constitute “good parents.”
In evidence, some parents who exposure unintended pregnancies will probably be worse at parenting than a saintly, infertile opposite-sex couple. But it doesn’t follow that we should place a kid with those parents because some study says they’d probably be better. Instead, we should follow principl