LGBTQ advocates, child welfare organizations, and others have helped defeat an amendment to a federal bill that would have allowed widespread discrimination against LGBTQ parents, LGBTQ youth, and others by taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the FY19 appropriations bill yesterday for the Departments of Labor, HHS, Education, and Defense, leaving out an amendment offered by Representative Robert Aderholt (R-AL) in July that had been approved by a 29-23 vote. The amendment would have permitted widespread discrimination by child service agencies against LGBTQ prospective parents, LGBTQ youth in care, single or divorced parents, interfaith couples, or people of religions other than the one espoused by the agency, among others, if providing services to them violated the agencies’ deeply held religious or moral beliefs. It would have reduced child welfare funding to states that do not allow religiously based discrimination against prospective parents or youth in care. In doing so, it would have harmed children in need of homes by reducing the number of otherwise eligible families and by allowing agencies to place them in ways not supportive of their identities (say, by placing a gay child with a family that believes they can “pray the gay away”).
The final version of the bill, however, already passed by the Senate, removed the “Aderholt Amendment,” Family Equality Council reports, killing it for this session of Congress.
Defeating the bill was a multi-pronged effort. After it was proposed in July, 40 senators led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) signed a letter to Senate Appropriations Committee leaders in opposition to the amendment, showing that if it was included, the bill could not gain the 60 votes needed to pass. And the Every Child Deserves a Family Campaign, a project of Family Equality Council, organized hundreds of child welfare, LGBTQ, faith, and allied organizations to sign letters to committee members asking them to drop the amendment. Many of you, too, I hope, reached out to your members of Congress urging them to oppose it.
There are still 10 states that have religious exemption laws that allow “Aderholt Amendment”-style discrimination in adoption and foster care under the guise of religious freedom. We’re not out of the woods yet—but there’s a little more light peeking through the trees.