Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council, says SB 407, his state's new law requiring foster parents to promise to go along with a foster child's chosen gender identity or sexual orientation, means parents cannot even keep their faith to themselves anymore.
"No longer would parents simply try and to be neutral or keep their beliefs to themselves; they have to upfront promise they will be affirming of whatever LGBT identity a child comes up with," Burt summarizes. "It doesn't even matter if the child is very young or if that child does not identify as LGBT."
He says his team at California Family Council has started getting phone calls from Christian parents who have done foster care for years. Social workers have accommodated their Christian beliefs by not sending them kids who identified as LGBT, but this new law is taking away their right to be foster parents at all.
"This is really violating the First Amendment, which says that you cannot prohibit someone from following their faith; you can't mandate they say government-approved words," Burt relays.
Meanwhile in Georgia, where adoption agencies are not allowed to deny adoption to married couples on the basis of their sexual orientation, a homosexual couple has been sentenced to 100 years in prison for sexually abusing and pimping out the two boys they adopted from a Christian special-needs agency.
Since California is not the only state that is telling parents they must tell a child a government-approved message, Burt hopes the Supreme Court or the federal courts will intervene.
He would like to remind Christian parents, as an attorney recently reminded him, that once the state determines that Christian foster parents are unfit to foster kids, "it's a small step for them to decide the Christian parent is not fit to raise their own children."
He believes California's determining that certain religious beliefs should prevent parents from raising kids should concern everyone.
