President Trump reportedly plans to roll back Obama-era anti-discrimination regulations which forced religious adoption agencies to accept eligible same-sex couples looking to adopt. This is a move that will allow religious organizations the ability to encourage abortions. It’s also a necessary constitutional correction that fixes President Barack Obama’s violation of the First Amendment by discriminating against religious organizations who receive federal funding.
Trump’s move is the emotionally uncomfortable but morally sound one.
On a personal level, the notion of barring a loving, gay couple from adopting a child while nearly half a million children languish in foster care just feels like a grave evil. It’s one thing to decline to perform a same-sex wedding or even refuse to acknowledge a same-sex marriage. But even if a religious person doesn’t acknowledge a same-sex marriage as legitimate, why would that prevent them from gifting a child with two loving parents? Surely religious people ought not to discriminate against single parents, and even more importantly, adoption agencies should be at the front line of the anti-abortion cause. It’s not a terribly compelling argument to tell a pregnant teenager to choose life only to then deny kids in need the parents who want them.
But Trump’s call is still correct. To understand the importance of religious liberty, we can’t just consider the ugliest example, but perhaps the best one of the slippery slope that denying religious liberty allows.
For a decade, Chick-fil-A has earned the ire of the most ardent of LGBTQ activists, not because the chain itself discriminates against gay patrons, but because the owner of Chick-fil-A is personally opposed to gay marriage. Even so, Chick-fil-A was on the front lines of charity in the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting, a horrific terrorist attack that intentionally targeted gay men.
The manufactured Chick-fil-A controversy seemed like it had mostly waned as cooler heads, including Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and the first openly gay major presidential candidate, acknowledged that sometimes a chicken sandwich is just a chicken sandwich. But now airports across the country have decided to step back into the culture wars, attempting to obstruct the openings and operations of Chick-fil-A franchises.
Now the Transportation Department has something to say about it. They’re investigating discriminatory practices against Chick-fil-A at the San Antonio International Airport and Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
“Federal requirements prohibit airport operators from excluding persons on the basis of religious creed from participating in airport activities that receive or benefit from FAA grant funding,” a Department of Transportation spokesman announced. “The findings of the investigations will be communicated to the complainants once the investigations are completed.”
The logical extension of Obama-era “anti-discrimination” regulations would inevitably allow federally funded entities such as airports to discriminate not just against obviously anti-gay operations, such as a restaurant that denies service to gay people, for example, but against restaurants that don’t engage in discrimination at all but happen to have a traditionally Christian owner. No, I wouldn’t donate a dime to an adoption agency that would rather keep kids in foster care than grant them the opportunity to obtain loving parents, but those agencies need just as much of a right to discriminate as donors and consumers have a right to boycott them.
Our right to religious liberty is so fundamental to our national ethos that it’s literally enshrined in the first entry of our Bill of Rights. Trump is correct to acknowledge that.
