Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Are Christians who oppose homosexuality fit to be foster parents?
Perhaps not, at least in the U.K. While postponing the ultimate decision, the Queen's Bench division of the High Court of Justice issued this opinion yesterday:
If children, whether they are known to be homosexuals or not, are placed with carers who . . . evince an antipathy, objection to or disapproval of, homosexuality and same-sex relationships, there may well be a conflict with the local authority's duty to "safeguard and promote" the "welfare" of looked-after children. There may also be a conflict with the National Minimum Standards for Fostering Services and the Statutory Guidance. Religion, belief and sexual orientation are protected characteristics under the Equality Act 2010. . . . While as between the protected rights concerning religion and sexual orientation there is no hierarchy of rights, there may . . . be a tension between equality provisions concerning religious discrimination and those concerning sexual orientation. Where this is so, Standard 7 of the National Minimum Standards for Fostering and the Statutory Guidance indicate that it must be taken into account and in this limited sense the equality provisions concerning sexual orientation should take precedence.
HT: Howard Friedman
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/03/are-christians-who-oppose-homosexuality-fit-to-be-foster-parents.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
Would it be right to place a 12- or 13-year-old struggling to come to grips with his or her sexual identity with Fred ("God Hates Fags") Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church? Would you place a young gay child with the person who wrote this on MOJ just a few days ago: "The proper Catholic response to Sodomy is execution; as our founders and almost all of Catholic history makes clear." Clearly there are some "Christian" attitudes toward homosexuality that any reasonable person would want to protect children from. The very well educated, good Catholic father of 10 who was our neighbor when I was in high school and college banished his gay son from the family, and his mother and siblings had to communicate with him secretly from then on. Look up "disown" and "gay" on Google and see how many stories you get of parents disowning gay children. Every parent should ask himself or herself whether—given the attitude they project toward homosexuality—whether they would be one of the first or one of the last persons a child of theirs would confide in if he/she came to the realize his/her homosexuality.
On the one hand, I would be hesitant to rule out foster parents because they held conventional beliefs that homosexuality was immoral. On the other hand, disapproval of a foster child's orientation or behavior that would cause parents to mistreat the child in any way would be legitimate cause not to have the child under the care of those parents. Mistreatment, in my opinion, would include subjecting the child to "reparative therapy" (opposed by the American Psychological Association and The American Psychiatric Association).
There are many ways Christians "oppose homosexuality," and a lot of them would rule adults out as fit parents.