Catholic Social Services and Foster Care: Ideology vs. Children – Part 2

An earlier article reviewed a discussion with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty Counsel, Lori Windham, concerning the case of Catholic Social Services, which she represented against the City of Philadelphia at the Supreme Court. Katheryn Jean Lopez, who conducted the interview, also discussed religious foster care with Naomi Schaefer Riley of the National Review Institute in November.

Windham discussed the legal side of religious foster care, focusing particularly on its human aspect. Riley gave some of the history and importance of faith based agencies. Lopez said that Riley “is expert on these issues,” whether she is describing the viewpoint of the Right or the Left.

Riley observed that Philadelphia, and “pretty much every city in the country reports a severe shortage of foster families.” She believes that while religious liberty is important, the key public policy question is addressing how best to care for children in need of foster homes, and they are best cared for in loving families. In the case of Philadelphia, Catholic Social Services has been filling the need for families “for a couple of hundred years now.” In generations past, foster care and adoption was an entirely private endeavor, and private religious charities, such as Catholic Social Services, would place children they knew were in need of homes with families that they knew would take care of them.

Now the supply of children for foster care comes from the government, which must ensure the care of children removed from homes that are too dangerous for them or who for other reasons have no home. A common reason for the removal of children, Riley and Lopez noted, is drug addiction on the part of parents. Municipalities depend to some considerable extent on private foster care agencies to place children. These agencies evaluate prospective foster parents, and if they approve the home, the government will place foster children there. After placement, the foster parent(s) interface with the agency’s social workers in caring for the child or children. 

Catholic Social Services does not place children with same-sex couples as a matter of policy. Its services must be in line with Catholic teaching regarding marriage and the family, which prescribes marriage and sexual relations only between one man and one woman. But Riley said, as was noted in the previous article, that there has never been a same-sex couple seeking to adopt through Catholic Social Services. And she added that over twenty agencies in the Philadelphia area do place children with same-sex couples.

Riley said that she is of a “more the merrier” persuasion as far as foster care agencies are concerned. Same-sex couples should be able to foster, she believes, but a foster care agency should not be required to place children with same sex-couples against its conviction. If Philadelphia Catholic Social Services follows the pattern of Catholic Social Services elsewhere required to do this, it will shut down its foster care service permanently (as it has already done temporarily until the case is resolved).

Riley expressed the concern that “if we lose these faith-based agencies, what will happen?” She said that couples and single persons who have adopted through these agencies will lose their support, and the support of other “wrap around” agencies. She said that “fostering is really difficult, up to half of foster care couples quit in the first year.” These failures happen despite the effort the agency has made to inspect and certify a home. Nevertheless, foster parents who utilize faith based agencies end up serving for longer as foster parents.

Lopez asked why the city government is trying to make foster care “more difficult” by no longer working with Catholic Social Services? Riley said that foster care, like other things, “is being used as a vehicle for fighting the culture wars.” She observed that recently Michigan proposed not allowing people owning firearms to foster children. This was not because of any tragedy resulting from foster parents’ ownership of guns, but simply “a way to stick it to people who like guns.” Prospective foster care families are very reasonably subjected to scrutiny, but the “hoops” that they have to go through are now “touchpoints in the culture war.” She said that California now requires foster parents to promise to support a child’s wish to attempt “gender transitioning” and use the child’s “preferred pronoun.”

Lopez asked why people influential in the controversy do not put the welfare of children first, rather than ideological commitments. Riley said that despite her attempts at “the more the merrier” argument, the news media continues to portray the issue as “discriminating against gay couples” even where there are no actual cases of discrimination, where there are many more agencies to work with, and even though placing children in homes should be the most important concern in any case.

Lopez asked Riley about “the inevitable comparison to interracial marriage.” The analogy of sexual discrimination to racial discrimination seems a fixed point with the LGBT agenda. She noted that Sharonell Fulton, the plaintiff in the case, has fostered mostly black children. Riley responded that current jurisprudence regarding same sex marriage is markedly different from that concerning racial integration. She noted as well that the agencies threatened with having to place children against their convictions place children of all races in foster homes. She said that she believes that Catholic Social Services “does a better job ensuring the placement of black children, frankly.” Additionally, she said that there is much (politically correct) racial discrimination in the placement of children. They are kept in foster care rather than being placed with an adoptive family of a different race, although there are a significant number of black children who need homes.

Riley observed that in general private agencies and religious agencies do a better job at placing children than the government does. Catholic Social Services also develops a community of people who are fostering or will support foster parents, offering them “respite” from their effort at parenting children who are in the crisis of foster care. The general public should be made aware of the important and expert work that faith based adoption and foster care agencies do, “and the huge danger of trying to put them out of business.”

Same-sex foster care is at the heart of the current case; Lopez asked how important LGBT issues truly are in child welfare. Riley said that many LGBT identifying persons are well educated, with good jobs, and make good parents. On the other hand only a small minority of the children in foster care are LGBT identifying children who were kicked out of their homes. She said that for those children who think that they are in the wrong body (reasonably a belief that many such children picked up from the wider culture) there “are many things that we should be thinking about before we give them hormones or surgery.” In this connection, she said that “foster care is supposed to be temporary.” It is hardly the place for life changing and irreversible treatments. Lopez responded to Riley by saying that any “gender transition” for children is basically child abuse. She observed that a sex-confused child may well have been sexually abused, and the state should not further add to his or her suffering.

The positions taken by different religious bodies on religious foster care, and those of different advocacy organizations, will be reviewed in a subsequent article.

View Part 3 here.