LGBTQ Adoption and Foster Care Rights
Adoption and Foster agencies can soon turn away prospective foster care parents and potential adoptive parents because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, in gratitude to President Trump’s administration proposal on November 1st, 2019.
Which states “no person otherwise eligible will be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or subjected to discrimination in the administration of HHS programs and services based on non-merit factors such as age, disability, sex, race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, or sexual orientation.” But under Trump’s rule, people would only be protected from discrimination in HHS programs to the extent that such discrimination is already banned by federal statute. There are no laws banning discrimination against gender identity and sexual orientation. So this new rule would allow recipients of HHS (Health and Human Services) grants, such as foster care agencies or substance use recovery programs, to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
Although this rule is not yet Final, the administration has announced “...[we will] stop enforcing Obama-era discrimination protections…” Meaning this is going to leave agencies free to turn away LGBTQ families, and can go beyond to others like non-Christian families that can affect a part of our First Amendment, Freedom of Religion.
The administration proposal wouldn’t just turn away qualified loving homes but this can hurt a wide range of programs such as HIV prevention and treatment for substance abuse but is targeting child welfare and can have a devastating effect on keeping children out of homes and shoveling them in prison systems.
“If you turn away a qualified loving family that want to open their home to a child, then you aren’t placing a child.” Said by Denise Brogan-Katie. There are about 443,000 children in the foster care system as of 2019 and only about half of them are in homes right now. 21.4% of same-sex couples have adopted but nearly 3% has been declined to foster and adopt. Instead of putting children into “qualified loving families” which would put children into homes by the hundreds, they’d rather keep children out homes because of personal beliefs. If Trump's Administration proposal goes through, the 3% would rise drastically and wouldn’t just be keeping children out of homes by the hundreds but by the thousands, meaning more than half of foster care children wouldn’t be put in to homes, instead couples or singles would be turned away because of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.