Trump Administration Allows Adoption Agencies to Discriminate Against Catholics and Jews

Aimee Maddonna is the kind of foster parent that child welfare agencies dream of: a married mom of three children, two of them with special needs, and hoping to foster kids who also have special needs. No surprise that when she visited the largest child-welfare agency in her hometown of Greenville, South Carolina, she passed all of the screening tests with flying colors.

Until she told them she was Catholic. That’s when her application was summarily rejected.

That’s because the agency in question, the state-funded, evangelical-run Miracle Hill Ministries only places children with “born again” Christian parents. In 2018, South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, issued an executive order specifically allowing this discrimination and asked for a federal waiver to allow Miracle Hill to receive federal taxpayer dollars disbursed by the state and turn away not just LGBT people, unmarried people, and anyone else they deemed religiously unfit, but non-evangelical Christians and Jews too. (At least two Jewish couples have also been denied by Miracle Hill.)

In January 2019, the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services granted that waiverI

In Donald Trump’s America, state- and federally funded adoption agencies and other child welfare agencies (CWAs) can now openly violate anti-discrimination laws and openly flout the “best interests of the child” standard that governs American family law, and can legally refuse to place children with anyone they religiously disapprove of.

If a Catholic diocese doesn’t want to hire a rabbi to celebrate Mass, that is perfectly legal. It’s legal if they want to turn gays away at the door too.  But when an organization takes federal money, that money comes with certain conditions, like not discriminating against Jews or gay people, and, in the case of adoption and foster care, making decisions based on the best interests of the child, not theology.

Maddonna is now in court, part of a lawsuit brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It’s one of several legal actions pending against a national assault against LGBT adoption—10 states specifically allow state-funded CWAs to turn gay people away because of their sexual orientation—that is so overbroad that it has now caught straight Catholics and Jews in its dragnet.

“This was once considered a fringe policy,” said Leslie Cooper, deputy director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project. “It’s now reached crisis levels.”