Ruth Institute Blog

On the one hand, Congress is once again introducing the “Every Child Deserves a Family Act”, designed to promote same-sex adoptions.  On the other hand, if you actually try to provide a child with a family, you have a 69% chance of being audited by the IRS.

By  David French

Earlier this week, in a feeble attempt at humor on Facebook, I posted: “If you haven’t been audited by the IRS during the Obama administration, can you even call yourself a conservative?” Given the scale of the abuses, I should probably just shorten it and say, “Only RINOs don’t get audited.” My wife and I got audited in 2011, with the IRS examining every inch of our adoption the previous year. The process was painful, but we got through it, and our refund may have been adjusted by a few dollars (the amount of the adjustment was so small, I don’t actually remember). In other words, the audit was a gigantic waste of time — for the IRS and for our family. A Facebook commenter, however, pointed me to a report that made me rethink the experience. Read more…

A great many of our fellow citizens see demands for homosexual marriage as just one more step in the democratic struggle against injustice and discrimination, a continuation of the fight against racism. It is in the name of equality, of open-mindedness, of being progressive and right-thinking that we are asked to accept this challenge to the foundations of our society. It seems, moreover, on the basis of public opinion polls, that this challenge is already accepted by a majority of our fellow citizens and thus the question of its establishment as a matter of law has not provoked a debate worthy of the momentous issues at stake. Read more…

NEW YORK, September 21 (C-FAM) Europe’s highest court on human rights will decide if a lesbian can adopt her partner’s child, in this case stripping the father of his parental rights to his son.

The case is very simple according to Gregor Puppinck of the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ).  “The two female partners want to oust the father and, since the law does not allow them to do so, they claim it is discriminatory,” Gregor reported in TurtleBayandBeyond (C-FAM’s blog). Read more…

More craziness from California:

California, the battleground state for the arguments for and against same-sex marriage, is now considering an unconventional law that would allow children to be legally granted more than two parents. Read more…

STATEMENT OF  MOST REVEREND EDWARD K. BRAXTON, BISHOP OF BELLEVILLE,  MOST REVEREND R. DANIEL CONLON, BISHOP OF JOLIET, AND
MOST REVEREND THOMAS JOHN PAPROCKI, BISHOP OF SPRINGFIELD IN ILLINOIS  REGARDING THE ENDING OF APPEALS OF FOSTER CARE LITIGATION

It is with deep regret that we have decided to relinquish our appeals in the litigation concerning the provision of foster care and adoption services by Catholic Charities of the Dioceses of Joliet and Springfield in Illinois and by Catholic Social Services of Southern Illinois in the Diocese of Belleville. This lawsuit had sought clarification as to whether the Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Unions Act passed at the end of last year protected the freedom of faith-based agencies to provide foster care and adoption services in accord with their religious beliefs. Read more…

by Charlie Butts and Bob Kellogg

After 90 years of assisting in providing foster care for children, Catholic Charities of Illinois has been forced to cease services.

The problem began with passage of the Illinois civil unions law for same-gender pairs, which led the state to force Christian foster care and adoption organizations to consider homosexual couples, even though that is contrary to basic Christian doctrine. Catholic Charities filed suit, but the state has already begun transferring the children out. Read more…

A friend sent me photos of street light posters he saw lining the streets of Hollywood. These posters were recruiting foster and adoptive parents in honor of National Adoption Month. What could be better than trying to recruit more foster and adoptive parents? 

But my friend noticed something odd: there were absolutely no mothers in any of these posters. All posters featured pairs of men, smiling with their adoptive African American children. 

 

So I went and took a look at the website for the campaign called www.RaiseaChild.us  It is a campaign specifically to recruit gay men and lesbians to become foster and adoptive parents. 

 

One of the partners in this campaign is called, “Southern California Foster Family and Adoption Agency.”  They state in their press release supporting this campaign, “nearly 50% of the families our agency works with are headed by single or partnered gays and lesbians.”

Why isn’t 50% gay families “inclusive” enough? Let’s say this particular private agency chooses to specialize completely in placing children with same sex couples and same sex attracted individuals.  Yet I doubt that religious agencies are allowed to specialize in adoptions with heterosexual married couples.

And there is disinformation associated with this campaign.  One of the partners in the campaign states, “Throughout the United States, there are an estimated 1 million gay households raising 2 million children.” But according to the very gay-friendly Williams Institute’s analysis, there are less than 650,000 same sex couples in the United States.  Of those, about 111,000 are raising their “own” children, which the Williams Institute defines as, “never-married children under 18 who are sons or daughters of one partner or spouse (Person 1) by birth, marriage (stepchild), or adoption.” 

How the Raise A Child campaign and its partners come up with a number of “1 million gay households raising 2 million children,” is a mystery to me. 

And look at the children in these posters.  I wonder what the African-American community thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of their community who have been taken from their parents.  Do the African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine they do. But I will let them speak for themselves. 

What I want to know is this: Why aren’t we recruiting stable heterosexual married couples to be foster parents? After all, we know for sure that children do best in married couple low-conflict households.  Same sex parenting is an untried social experiment. Parenting by male couples is especially unstudied, since it is exceedingly uncommon.  Even the very pro-gay researchers Judith Stacey, could find only one study comparing gay male parenting with heterosexual couples that qualified for  inclusion in her comprehensive survey of gay parenting studies.[1]

 Now I realize that stable heterosexual married couples might not be so easy to find in Hollywood.  But hey, LA is a big town. There are lots of nice neighborhoods you could go to recruit stable heterosexual married couples, assuming, of course, that helping children really is the main point of the campaign.  

From the beginning of the sexual revolution, from no fault divorce to widespread cohabitation to out of wedlock childbearing, society has been surrendering the interests of children to the interests of adults, far too often and far too lightly. Many of the children in foster care, landed there precisely because of the failures of earlier episodes in the sexual revolution. Some are the children of unmarried mothers, or teen mothers.  Some have been abused by their mothers’ live-in boyfriends, who are statistically by far the most dangerous people for children to live with.

Children in foster care are the most vulnerable children in society.  These kids deserve better than to be human guinea pigs, in yet another round of social experimentation.  We should be pulling out all the stops to recruit stable heterosexual married couples to care for these children, not using their plight as an opportunity to “celebrate diversity.”  End of story. 

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by Zac Alstin

The illusion that moral diversity is a viable social strategy is at its last gasp.

Click here to watch the video.

A British Member of Parliament has given voice to the idea that religious organisations should be forced to perform same-sex marriages or civil unions. In a letter to Prime Minister David Cameron, Conservative MP Mike Weatherly wrote: “As long as religious groups can refuse to preside over ceremonies for same-sex couples, there will be inequality. Such behaviour is not be [sic] tolerated in other areas, such as adoption, after all.” Read more…