Arizona’s faith-based adoption and foster-care agencies soon may refuse to work with people whose religious views differ from their own. Opponents of the new law protecting those agencies insist it will harm children who need safe, loving homes.
The Arizona legislature passed and Gov. Doug Ducey signed the law this spring. It takes effect in late September, 90 days after the state’s legislative session ended.
The law “protects foster and adoption agencies from religious discrimination, absolving them of how they provide — or deny — services in line with their religious beliefs,” the Arizona Mirror reported. The law also “establishes the right of foster parents to use their own religion to raise children in their care.”
The conservative Center for Arizona Policy, a Christian lobby with a record of promoting anti-LGBTQ policies and legislation, supported the bill, the Mirror said. Children’s Action Alliance, the Coconino Coalition for Children and Youth, and 15 other organizations opposed it.
Critics of the new law warned it provides adoption and foster agencies cover to discriminate against people who are capable of and willing to provide care for children, the Mirror said.
Children in the state’s foster-care system already outnumber licensed families four to one, it reported.
Based on responses to similar laws in other states, the new Arizona policy could have a chilling effect on Jewish and other families who wish to provide foster care, Tammy Gillies, a regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Mirror. In Tennessee, a Jewish couple were denied an opportunity to adopt, and in South Carolina, a Catholic mother was turned down for foster care because she is not a Protestant.
“A long-held tenet of foster care is support, encouragement and respect for biological families’ cultures and religious practices.” — Virginia Watahomigie, executive director of Coconino Coalition for Children and Youth
The Center for Arizona Policy affirmed the law. On its website, it asserted the new law protects agencies that hold a “historical or religious view of human sexuality” from encroachment by modern perspectives.
On Twitter, the center said: “Arizona will protect the interest of children and faith-based foster care & adoption agencies by prohibiting discrimination based on religious views. Thank you, @DougDucey.”
But the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy organization, warned the law will enable faith-based agencies to turn down LGBTQ applicants, stressing this will harm LGBTQ children who want to live in affirming homes.
And by expressly affirming foster parents’ right to “use their own religion to raise children in their care,” the law undermines the religious rights of foster children’s biological families, an Arizona child advocate told the Mirror.
“A long-held tenet of foster care is support, encouragement and respect for biological families’ cultures and religious practices,” said Virginia Watahomigie, executive director of the Coconino Coalition for Children and Youth. Almost half of Arizona foster children eventually will be reunited with their biological families, and she expressed concern the new law “will introduce further trauma in foster children’s already difficult experience.”
Foster children also have rights, added Molly Dunn, Children’s Action Alliance’s policy director. “We shouldn’t have the foster parents’ rights trumping the rights of the children who are temporarily in their care.”
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