Right before Donald Trump entered office, the Obama administration rushed a new policy that effectively barred religious adoption and foster care agencies from receiving federal funding if they rejected same-sex couples.
The policy was a misguided, hastily implemented, clear violation of the freedom of conscience, or, the right to run an explicitly religious institution according to religious tenets.
Over the past year, the Trump administration has been gradually rolling it back, along with many other Obama-era nondiscrimination policies. But now Trump’s roll-back is being challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has claimed faith-based grounds are not enough for Christian adoption and foster care agencies to reject same-sex prospective parents.
But the Trump administration is not backing down — it’s doing the opposite.
Last week the White House confirmed that the Department of Health and Human Services would be introducing new federal rules that pertain directly to faith-based groups, allowing them to ignore any previous nondiscrimination regulations passed at the regulatory level.
Christian adoption and foster care agencies must still adhere to nondiscrimination provisions passed by Congress, but the HHS has all but declared Obama-era regulations null and void.
This is an important win for religious freedom, and for children around the nation in desperate need of loving homes. Shutting out religious agencies has proved disastrous for the states that enforced Obama’s guidelines. In 2011, Illinois severed its partnership with faith-based agencies, and as a result, lost more than 1,500 foster homes over the next five years.
And just last year, Philadelphia canceled its contracts with Catholic Social Services, displacing hundreds of children. The city then had to put out an urgent call for hundreds of available foster families since it could not find enough homes on its own.
This doesn’t just cripple religious agencies, which is certainly the intent. It ostracizes and hurts thousands of children who become nothing more than collateral damage in the state’s attempt to enforce a politically correct agenda.
Critics have pointed out that because the U.S. needs as many adoptive and foster homes as it can get, religious agencies should be more open to same-sex parents. But for many Christians, to do so would be a deep violation of the religious conviction that marriage should be between one man and one woman. Faith-based agencies enforce this conviction not out of malice or bigotry, as the ACLU suggests, but out of love.
As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Obergefell v. Hodges, the traditional view of marriage is “based on decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises” that must be respected, at both the state and federal level. The merits of this conviction can be debated at the individual level, to be sure, but to argue that the government can and should upend religious institutions’ beliefs in the name of social justice is just as bigoted as the thing these cultural Leftists claim to hate. And more important, it’s blatantly unconstitutional.
Luckily, the Trump administration is returning the federal government to a constitutional interpretation of the law. The ACLU has argued the HHS’s new rule is a license to discriminate against LGBT individuals. This is a dishonest representation of the rule, which shouldn’t surprise anyone remotely familiar with the ACLU’s work. Instead, this new regulation ensures that no one is excluded from federal funding, whether they’re religious or not.
This will maximize the number of homes available and ensure that faith-based agencies aren’t forced to choose between their faith and their ministry. This is an important step in the right direction and one that’s been long overdue.
