A bill passed this week in Kansas and another passed in Oklahoma will allow adoption agencies to discriminate against gays and still receive taxpayer dollars on the grounds of so-called religious liberty.
This will harm children by reducing the number of families who would take them in. Not only that but it's degrading and unfair to gay tax payers because it openly says that entities which do not treat us fairly can help themselves to our money.
But leave it to the Family Research Council to distort the situation, making the LGBTQ community seem like the villains:
LGBT activists have been fond of saying that same-sex marriage would never affect you. Well, now, it's not only affecting you -- it's affecting needy kids.
Across the country, Christian charities and adoption services have been bracing themselves against wave after wave of attack from liberals, desperate to kick them out of the child welfare industry. As far as these extremists are concerned, no organization -- including an explicitly religious one -- should be allowed to operate if they hold a biblical view of marriage. In places like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Massachusetts, their crusade has gone so far as to close down one of the largest child placement services in the area -- Catholic Charities -- because it refused to compromise its core beliefs.
Fortunately, in some states, the bullying is prompting a counter-attack from common sense lawmakers, who think it's well within a charity's right to decide which homes are the best and most loving options for children. In Oklahoma, the state legislature followed in the suit of at least five other states, sending a measure to Gov. Mary Fallin's (R) desk that would give religious groups the freedom to exercise their faith in their placement policies. Democrats were so irate during the debate that the presiding officer threatened to have one member removed.
In nearby Kansas, legislators acted hours later, passing their version of the "Child Welfare Inclusion Act" 63-58 in the House and 24-15 in the Senate early this morning. "This is a matter of activist groups who don't like certain religious beliefs and they want to use the power of the government to crush people that operate according to those religious beliefs," said Michael Schuttloffel, the director of the Kansas Catholic Conference. With, as the AP points out, an already overloaded foster care system, the state can't afford to lose a single provider – let alone one of Kansas's biggest.
Governor Jeff Coyler (R) must have agreed, promising to make the bill law. "Catholic Charities and other adoption agencies are key to the fabric of our communities. I look forward to signing this bill because it increases the opportunities for needy children to find loving homes." Hopefully, his counterpart in Oklahoma will follow suit, recognizing that liberal activists are more concerned with pushing their intolerant agenda than they are with finding children good homes.
It's not accidental that FRC omitted same-sex couples who adopt children. To the group, families like that either don't exist or don't count. And it's also not by accident that the organization lied about Catholic Charities. No one forced them to shut down. They chose to shut down because they couldn't have things both ways - i.e. discriminate against gays while taking our money.
It's rather vile of FRC to claim that the LGBTQ community is harming innocent children when we are merely asserting our rights as taxpayers and when the organization itself has done NOTHING to help children needing adoption except for conjuring up ways to degrade the LGBTQ community. FRC doesn't care about children needing to be adopted more than it cares about keeping the LGBTQ community under heel.
Related post:
To the Family Research Council, anti-Christian persecution is bad but anti-LGBTQ persecution is appropriate - It's been a busy week for the hate group. Earlier, it praised Trump for protecting Christians from international persecution then a day later, slammed the Obama Administration for doing the same thing for the LGBTQ community.
