No one in Oregon is prohibiting Jessica Bates from exercising her religious rights, but they are denying her equal access to state-managed child welfare programs, including adoption because she’s a Christian.
The agency refuses to place a child unless “individuals seeking to adopt … agree to “respect, accept, and support … the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of any child the department could place in an applicant’s home.”
“Oregon’s policy amounts to an ideological litmus test: people who hold secular or ‘progressive’ views on sexual orientation and gender identity are eligible to participate in child welfare programs, while people of faith with religiously informed views are disqualified because they don’t agree with the state’s orthodoxy,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jonathan Scruggs, director of the ADF Center for Conscience Initiatives. “The government can’t exclude certain communities of faith from foster care and adoption services because the state doesn’t like their particular religious beliefs.”
Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a lawsuit in Federal court.
“Oregon’s policy makes a sweeping claim that all persons who hold certain religious beliefs—beliefs held by millions of Americans from diverse religious faiths—are categorically unfit to care for children,” said ADF Legal Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse. “That’s simply not true. Oregon is putting its political agenda above the needs of countless children who would be happy to grow up in a loving, Christian home like Jessica’s. We urge the court to remind the state of its constitutional and moral obligations and reaffirm Jessica’s First Amendment right to live out her faith without being penalized by the government.”
I’m no lawyer, and I don’t play one on the internet, but I’m not convinced there is a clear-cut first amendment conflict. Congress shall make no law true, and the 14th Amendment applies that restriction to the states, but denying an adoption application doesn’t interfere with her ability to exercise her faith. No one is stopping her from being a Christian. That was why I opened with the question of equal access under the law.
The US Supreme Court has repeatedly pointed out that neither states nor the Federal Government may exclude individuals or organizations from access to programs, grants, funding, or resources based on religious beliefs. That idea is rooted in First Amendment Protections with the 14th Amendment application of equal protection or equal rights under the law (at least, I think it does).
Put differently, to apply force discriminately (denial of rights permitted to others) creates state-sanctioned pretense based on religion, which is prohibited. That still sounds swiss-cheesy to me, as in full of holes, and while I feel like I’m on the right track, I’ve simply failed to articulate it properly.
As ADF notes, Oregon has created an ideological litmus test that millions of people of faith around the country could not pass. And while the state can deny taxpayer-funded benefits to individuals based on a wide range of factors, faith can’t be one of them.
Oregon can have a gender identity rule, but it can’t enforce it on these terms. If a court agrees, we should expect the state to come back with new rules – assuming they do not already exist – that label any parent or guardian who questions matters of gender or sexual identity as guilty of child abuse which, ironically, is how most people would characterize drugged and mutilated children sacrificed to the secular gods who frame the belief systems in the Oregon Department of Human Services.
HT | ADF Legal
