When Idealism Outweighs Need and Practicality

President Trump recently signed an executive order urging state CPS agencies to partner with any adoption and foster care agencies that are willing, regardless of faith based discrimination those agencies may engage in.  This flies in the face of organizations defending (or perhaps attempting to establish) LGBTQ rights, which have been lobbying for the prohibition of government partnerships with faith based adoption organizations that discriminate based on their beliefs.  Their argument is that faith based organizations often hinder adoption more than they help.  According to Donald Trump though, there are currently 400,000 children in the U.S. waiting for adoption or foster care, and the prohibition in some states of government partnership with faith based adoption agencies is a significant part of the problem.

There are a few things that are important to understand, before moving on to the critical question.  The one that should be most obvious is that government prohibitions against partnerships between CPS and faith based child placement agencies does reduce resources for child placement.  While partnerships would require the states to provide some funding for those agencies, that is not their only source of income.  Thus, by refusing to work with them, states are actually refusing to use existing resources that are at their disposal.  Second, states refusing to work with faith based agencies has not increased the number of purely secular agencies significantly.  This is not a matter of faith based agencies competing with secular agencies.  Partnering with faith base agencies in addition to secular agencies will not actually hinder adoption more than it will help, because all of the existing secular options will still exist.  It would be trivial for state Health and Welfare departments to add a page to their web sites listing all partner agencies, along with any restrictions those agencies have.  (Even many secular agencies only serve married couples, based on a large body of research showing that children with married parents have significantly better mental and emotional health than children with single or cohabitating but unmarried parents.)  In short, religious child placement agencies cannot prevent people from going to secular agencies, and they have no power to interfere with placements made by those agencies.  The claim that faith based agencies often hinder adoption more than helping is actually completely false.  They may not adopt children to LGBTQ or single parents, but they still have a net positive rate of adoption, and they do not hinder adoptions arbitrated by secular agencies.

The critical question all of this brings up is this: Is it appropriate to put idealism ahead of need and practicality?  The fact is that state prohibitions against partnerships with faith based placement agencies significantly reduce the rate at which children can be placed.  The fact is, state prohibitions against partnerships with faith based placement agencies is putting an ideal of fairness for LGBTQ people ahead of the well being of children.  What is more important, that governments do not provide even the slightest amount of funding to people who base their services on their faith or giving these 400,000 children homes?  Does the want of LGBTQ people to be treated exactly the same as everyone else, even down to the most trivial details, outweigh the need of these children to have stable homes with good parents?

Perhaps it is time for U.S. liberals to start thinking about how their social justice crusade is actually affecting other people.  They have raised a huge stink about Trump enforcing Obama's immigration policy, resulting in the detention of 100,000 illegal immigrant children, but minor inconvenience to a tiny portion of the population is enough for them to ignore 400,000 American children who are in a very similar boat.  President Donald Trump may not be perfect, but at least he actually cares about our children.

How screwed up is a nation that will endorse religious discrimination that causes serious harm to enormous numbers of children, to allow a minority of around 4% of the population to feel affirmation?