Before addressing a court case in the news this week concerning adoptions, let’s conduct a thought experiment.
For out-of-wedlock births, Islam approves of both sides of the adoption process — the birth mother relinquishing custody, and the couple taking legal guardianship of the child. But under Islamic law, all children born to Muslim parents must be raised as Muslims. Imagine if, with these two considerations in mind, a Muslim group established a charitable adoption agency that excluded non-Muslims from adopting Muslim-born orphans.
Surely all decent people would applaud. The adoption agency would be helping orphans find loving homes, helping mothers find good people to raise their children without violating their faith, and helping couples find children they could nurture.
And, surely, nobody would yell about the “discrimination” against Christian or Jewish families looking to adopt. They could look elsewhere. Indeed, secular adoption agencies openly advertise “finding your perfect match” for both birth mothers and adoptive parents. Religion is among the categories for which a birth mother may screen. Nobody suggests that the screening — the act of choosing between several alternatives — implies that Christians or Jews can’t be good parents. Instead, it’s just a matter of respecting the faith and choice of the birth mother, and, in the case of our hypothetical Muslim adoption charity, respecting the charity’s faith, too.
This serves as backdrop for a Sept. 7 decision by a federal district court in New York, pursuant to an earlier decision and referral by the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, forbidding New York from shuttering a traditionalist Christian adoption agency.
After the New Hope Family Services, Inc., had already been in operation for more than 50 years, New York ordered that it be shut down unless its changes its policy against arranging adoptions for same-sex or unmarried parents. Yet as the appeals court had noted, New Hope “does not itself disapprove [reject] such couples; rather, it refers them to other adoption agencies.” New Hope’s stated mission is explicitly a religious ministry, opening its prospective-parent meetings with prayers while conveying a “system of values about life, marriage, family, and sexuality to both birthparents and adoptive parents.”
Nonetheless, New York’s Office of Children and Family Services decided New Hope’s policy is “discriminatory [against same-sex and unmarried couples] and impermissible” under its interpretation of state law.
The courts rightly determined that New York was out of line. The First Amendment guarantees that government will not inhibit the “free exercise” of religion. By now, after so many court decisions reasserting this principle, government agencies should have gotten the message. A religious baking artist who otherwise readily serves homosexuals has every right to balk at referring them elsewhere specifically for marriage ceremonies. Nuns who consider abortion to be a mortal sin have every right to refuse even administrative participation in providing insurance that pays for abortions. And so on.
Practicalities, not just the Constitution, favor this result. An adoption ministry that serves only people of its own faith does not even slightly harm anyone else. This is especially true when that ministry readily refers people to other adoption agencies if they are uncomfortable with the ministry’s requirements.
Indeed, it should be easy for people of good will to recognize that New Hope has the right, and the mission, to help a chosen subset of families participate on both ends of adoptions. Just as the hypothetical Muslim adoption agency would serve a unique subset of families that otherwise would be bereft of options acceptable to them, so does New Hope do likewise.
Let’s pause, for absolute clarity: Acknowledging New Hope’s rights does not, repeat not, require observers or government to believe unmarried or same-sex couples make bad parents. Plenty of same-sex couples provide loving homes for children. And, Lord knows, plenty of married heterosexual couples prove to be awful parents. Instead, observers merely must recognize that religious liberty benefits everybody by letting differing ministries serve different niches and needs.
In practice, too, not a single child would be helped if New York closes New Hope Family Services. Restricting the choices for birth parents and adoptive parents harms, not helps, children and communities.
One can believe New Hope’s restrictions are misguided while still acknowledging overall that it, like the fictional Muslim ministry, is providing a service that is loving and beneficial — and, of course, perfectly legal.
