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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Americans are observing National Adoption Month in November, continuing a tradition that first began in 1995. “We celebrate the life-changing act of adoption,” President Trump said in this year’s official declaration. “[W]e must continue to assist families who are willing to adopt children in need of a permanent home.”

Sadly, it seems not everyone in the Trump administration got the memo. Just one day earlier, a federal judge in Tacoma, Washington, granted a preliminary injunction requested by three adoption agencies against the U.S. Department of State. In a clear rebuke of bureaucratic overreach, Judge Ronald Leighton overturned the State Department’s “arbitrary and capricious” action, which had forced the three agencies to suspend their adoption programs.

The case, Faith International Adoptions v. Pompeo, is just one salvo in an ongoing conflict between the State Department and adoption organizations. Two years ago, the State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues proposed onerous new regulations governing overseas adoption. Adoption advocates mobilized for a fight, but their real break came with the election of President Trump, whose deregulation agenda killed the plan. The State Department soon regrouped. Earlier this year, it began quietly implementing many of its desired regulations not through direct rule-making, but by hijacking the process by which agencies are accredited.

“[The State Department] had attempted to pass regulations which would have eliminated up to three-fourths of adoption agencies,” says John Meske, executive director of Faith International Adoptions, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. “When that failed, they decided to use the accreditation process instead, and get rid of agencies that way.” . . .

The suit’s three plaintiffs—Faith International Adoptions, Amazing Grace Adoptions, and Adopt Abroad, Inc.—lost their accreditation to perform adoptions under the Hague Adoption Convention this spring. This occurred not due to alleged agency misconduct, but to a sudden change in the way the State Department interpreted its own regulations. (Read more from “State Department Continues Its Cruel War on Adoption Agencies” HERE)

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The evidence already is overwhelming that homosexual activists don’t just want their rights protected, they want Christians’ rights removed . . .

Now a related case, this time over adoption, is underway in Michigan.

Same-sex duos have filed suit against a law allowing the state to work with religious adoption agencies.

The Alliance Defending Freedom filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of 53 state lawmakers there who want the challenge to the state law thrown out.

They argue the law is in the state’s interest: “When it is necessary for a child in this state to be placed with an adoptive or foster family, placing the child in a safe, loving, and supportive home is a paramount goal.” (Read more from “Over 50 Lawmakers Defend Rights of Christian Adoption Agencies” HERE)

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