The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services yesterday granted South Carolina a waiver so that federally funded adoption and foster care agencies in the state may discriminate based on a person’s religion, LGBTQ identity, or other factors that do not harmonize with the religious beliefs that the agency espouses.
The waiver came after Miracle Hill Ministries, a Protestant foster care agency, turned away Beth Lesser, who is Jewish, from serving as a mentor to foster youth because she did not share Miracle Hill’s beliefs, as Greenville News reported. Lesser and her husband had served as foster parents in Florida before moving to South Carolina.
After Lesser was turned away by Miracle Hill, the state’s Department of Children and Family Services told the agency it must comply with federal nondiscrimination policy or lose its contract, Family Equality informs us—but Governor Henry McMaster (R) intervened and requested a waiver from HHS so that Miracle Hill could continue to discriminate. That’s the waiver that HHS just granted.
After the waiver was requested, South Carolina passed a bill to become one of ten states in total (Alabama, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Virginia) whose laws now allow similar “religious exemptions” in child services. All but Alabama allow them to do so even if they receive government funding for those services. This is a growing threat to children and youth in care, as I’ve written about once or twice before, as it restricts the number of otherwise qualified homes available to them. It’s an attack on LGBTQ prospective parents as well as non-LGBTQ ones who are single, divorced, or of a different religion (or no religion).
HHS support of such actions should perhaps come as no surprise, though. A year ago, HHS established a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division, part of its Office for Civil Rights (OCR), to handle complaints from health care workers who believe they have experienced discrimination because they objected to, refused to participate in, or were coerced into participating in procedures that go against their religious or moral beliefs, such as abortion, sterilization, or assisted suicide. It has been trying to remove or delay collection of data related to sexual orientation and gender identity of children in foster homes, the elderly, and people with disabilities, and is considering wiping out recognition and protections of transgender people. As the Lesser’s situation shows, however, LGBTQ people are not the only ones who could be the targets of religious exemptions to federal law and taxpayer funded programs—and ultimately, it’s children who will suffer.
There are a few gleams of hope. Last July, a federal court ruled in a Philadelphia case that government-contracted child welfare agencies do not have a right to exclude same-sex couples or others from fostering children if they (the prospective parents) don’t fit an agency’s religious beliefs. The U.S. House in September rejected an amendment that would have allowed discrimination by taxpayer-funded child service agencies to be enshrined in federal law. And the Every Child Deserves a Family Campaign continues to work for children and youth in foster care and against such discrimination at the state and federal level.
Still, as Maggie Siddiqi, director of the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative at the Center for American Progress, said in a statement:
This decision weaponizes our nation’s right to religious freedom in order to justify discrimination in the foster care system, depriving children of welcoming homes. It is wrong for the government to hand out taxpayer dollars to a foster agency and then sanction that agency’s discrimination against certain qualified prospective parents, whether they be Jewish, LGBTQ, or a member of some other minority group. Such approval raises serious constitutional concerns and imposes one narrow religious viewpoint on others.
And as a Jew myself, I’m sobered by this statement from Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, Director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism: “As Jews, we know too well that state-backed religious discrimination quickly becomes a stain on the nation.”
Separation of religion and state is a founding principle of our country. Religious freedom, the principle touted by those pushing for religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, is not a license to impose one’s beliefs or the actions stemming from those beliefs on others, much less use taxpayer funds to do so. HHS—and the Trump administration generally—has shown it is sadly and harmfully unaware of this.