Why It’s Not Discrimination for Christian Agencies to Only Recruit Christian Foster and Adoptive Parents
In October, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization that claims to be founded on Jewish values, accused South Carolina’s Miracle Hill foster care agency of discrimination for exclusively serving Christian parents. The ADL blasted Miracle Hill’s action of recruiting only Christian foster care parents as “immoral” and “deeply disturbing.”
But the ADL forgets that, for more than a century, American Jewish organizations have placed Jewish children with Jewish families. During World War II, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) and the German Jewish Children’s Aid Society (GJCAS) helped Jewish orphans fleeing Nazi persecution find homes with Jewish families in the United States. Five decades later, as Jewish orphans fled the Soviet Union, Jewish organizations in the United States helped them find Jewish homes. This was not a story about discrimination, it was about preservation—of shared traditions, history, and values.
Rather than honor these traditions, the ADL has joined the American left’s ongoing crusade to eradicate faith from our nation’s foster care and adoption agencies. In Philadelphia, Catholic Social Services is desperately fighting the city for the right to continue to serve children without sacrificing its Catholic principles. In Buffalo, New York, Catholic Charities was forced to end its adoption services because of its practice of placing a child only with both a mom and a dad. . .
The ADL thinks that publicly funding faith-based adoption agencies violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment, but it is wrong. Although the First Amendment prohibits any “establishment of religion,” its framers never thought that providing funding to religious organizations on the same basis as to secular organizations would count as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Indeed, the Supreme Court held in Trinity Lutheran that the government may fund religious organizations on equal footing with secular ones without running afoul of the establishment clause.
What this case is really about is the free exercise of religion under our laws. That is why faith-based agencies like Miracle Hill need President Trump and the Department of Health and Human Services to implement regulations that support one of our most cherished founding principles: religious freedom. (Read more from “Why It’s Not Discrimination for Christian Agencies to Only Recruit Christian Foster and Adoptive Parents” HERE)
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