Stop Adoption Discrimination in Michigan
- by: Susan V
- recipient: Michigan Legislators
Just as the U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule on allowing same-sex marriage in Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder has signed a law that would limit the ability of these couples and others to adopt.
Passed by GOP majorities in both houses, the bill will allow faith-based adoption agencies to deny services to families they decide violate their religious beliefs. Deceptively posing as a bill protecting religious freedom, it will discriminate against same-sex and unmarried couples and also the religious rights of those of other faiths.
Most disturbing is that faith-based agencies handle about 50% of the state’s adoptions, according to the Detroit Free Press, and they pocketed more than half of the almost $20 million the state spent last year on adoption services.
Not only is the ACLU concerned about the discrimination issues, child advocates worry about the fate of 13,000 children should these agencies lose state funding when the Supreme Court bans same-sex discrimination.
One solution would be for the state to spend more money on preserving biological families rather than providing faith-based agencies the financial power to influence political decisions about who should and should not be parents.
But those children who truly need to be in the system deserve to have access to any loving and capable prospective parent, regardless of sexual identification, marital status or religious beliefs.
Insist that Michigan repeal new laws that permit adoption discrimination!
We, the undersigned, are opposed to faith-based adoption agencies having the power to decide who and who should not be parents.
Already, biological parents with fixable flaws and even some with disabilities or low incomes are having their children taken from them by social services agencies in many states. If faith-based adoption agencies wield enough financial power to influence politicians to allow them to discriminate in the adoption process, this discrimination could also spill over to infringe upon single parents’ rights or gay relatives’ efforts to keep children with their biological families, where the National Coaltion for Child Protection Reform says they belong in the majority of cases.
Furthermore, as the Detroit Free Press notes in its scathing criticism of the new bill, “there's simply no credible evidence that same-sex couples make worse parents. Legions of experts backed by well-vetted research testified as much in a legal challenge to Michigan's constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.”
Therefore, adds the DFP, both of these discriminatory measures “fail the rational-basis test that legitimate legislation must be able to withstand.”
The anti-gay laws also hark back to the days of Jim Crow when religious objections influenced legislation that banned couples of mixed races from legally marrying. There are numerous stories of the cruelty and inconveniences those backward laws put loving couples (like the Lovings of Virginia) through before the Supreme Court finally put an end to this long-lasting remnant of racial discrimination.
Now it’s time to move forward on gay rights, but Michigan seems intent on going back to those days of bigotry.
The signers of this petition call for an immediate end to adoption discrimination in Michigan and legislators’ repeal of new laws that discriminate against same-sex couples.
Visit:
http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/editorials/2015/06/11/faith-based-adoption/71074414/
http://www.nccpr.org/reports/01SAFETY.pdf
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