Stop Sexualizing Children

By Kathryn Jean Lopez

Monday, August 14, 2023

 

‘Their faith is not supportive.” That was the official Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) determination about Mike and Kitty Burke’s home-study application to be foster parents. Otherwise qualified to be certified as foster parents, they failed over a series of hypothetical questions about sexual orientation and gender dysphoria. The Burkes said they would love and accept any child. They also said they wouldn’t discard their religious beliefs about human sexuality. As a result, they cannot foster children in their state.

 

They’ve gone to court over this. And it would seem they have a good case: When the City of Philadelphia cut long-standing ties with Catholic Social Services because of what the Church teaches about marriage, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in the Church’s favor. “Catholics need not apply” isn’t constitutionally kosher. For the sake of some 1,500 children in foster care in Massachusetts, I hope it doesn’t take as long as a Supreme Court case for DCF to be set straight. For as long as child-welfare workers are discriminating against solid candidates for foster parents, it’s children who suffer.

 

This Massachusetts case is not unheard of. Just before the Covid lockdowns took effect in March 2020, the Washington Department of Child, Youth, and Families worked to keep James and Gail Blais from caring for their great-granddaughter because they had the “wrong” answers to hypothetical questions about the future sexual preferences of the one-year-old girl. In this case, it was decided that Seventh-Day Adventists need not apply. As with the Burkes in Massachusetts and in the Philadelphia case, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which specializes in religious liberty for all, represented them. A judge eventually ruled that “if the only factor weighing against an otherwise qualified applicant has to do with their sincerely held religious beliefs, the Department must not discriminate against a foster care applicant based on their creed.”

 

Politics is probably the worst place to have to have these debates. Polls have suggested that people don’t believe that religious liberty is being threatened in the United States. They are right, if you compare things with the experience of Coptic Christians in Egypt or priests being regularly kidnapped or killed in Nigeria.

 

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have our problems. Looking back at the headlines about the Philadelphia case, we can see that much of the media covered the ruling as a loss for gay rights. But what about the children? Foster care cannot be about adults. It needs to be about the children. And, for the record, gay couples are not unable to foster and adopt in America. In a pluralistic society, we have many agencies from which to choose. Catholics should not have to get out of the foster and adoption ministry because of current mores.

 

This Massachusetts case, like the Washington State one, also raises a nonconstitutional question: When are we going to stop sexualizing children? In the case of the Blais family, their great-granddaughter was a one-year-old. It reminds me of New York governor Kathy Hochul’s immediate reaction to the leak of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion. She tweeted that her infant granddaughter’s’ “right to choose” was being denied. When a girl is a baby, why are we thinking about her future sex life and possible abortion? Who thinks like this? People who see everything through ideological lenses. Do we really want to be those people? More important: Don’t children deserve better from us?

 

Real children need families. The Burkes are upstanding citizens. He’s an Iraq War vet. She has worked as a paraprofessional for children with special needs. They own a business and are active in their church. They seem like fitting candidates. If we can put politics and so-called culture wars aside, can’t we agree that children in foster care deserve good families? Doesn’t this matter more than litmus tests about hypothetical questions about how the children might be confused as preteens or teenagers?

 

There are not enough foster parents in the United States. And the facts that these cases highlight are part of the reason that couples who step up to the plate tend to give up. And yet ministries such as the Christian Alliance for Orphans emphasize that if even one family in every church in America became foster parents — caring for the orphans, as Scripture instructs — we’d solve the problem. This is not about making more Christians. It’s about making sure that every child has a home.  Besides the fact that it’s a violation of the freedom of religion to prohibit Catholics and other people of traditional religious faith from being foster parents, surely people of good will can see that banning all believing Christians from fostering is harmful to children who need a family.

 

It’s worth a prayer that we can put aside some of our adult disagreements to be adults and love children. Having a good family makes all the difference. Children deserve better than our same old politics. And, goodness, they certainly deserve government agencies that exist to stop making everything about sex. Let’s drop the caricatures, for the children.