Clinging To Gender Ideology Mandates Is A Losing Strategy

Washington state just blinked.

In a May 20 settlement that should send shockwaves through every child welfare agency still clinging to gender ideology mandates, the state’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families agreed to a permanent injunction barring officials from denying or restricting foster care licenses based on applicants’ religious beliefs about marriage, gender, or sexual relationships.

The settlement in the Washington case did not happen in a vacuum. It followed a jurisprudential earthquake from the Ninth Circuit in Bates v. Pakseresht. Jessica Bates, an Oregon widow who wanted to open her home to two specific children in need, was told she first had to agree to affirm any foster child’s claimed gender identity. She refused not out of animus, but out of conviction that she could not in good conscience speak words she believed to be false.

The Ninth Circuit agreed that Oregon’s policy engaged in viewpoint discrimination and violated Bates’ free speech and free exercise of religion, and ordered the state to allow her to begin the adoption process without first submitting to its ideological litmus test.

Behind the legal filings were families whose experiences put human faces on what can otherwise seem like an abstract legal dispute. Through accounts shared with the appellate court, foster and adoptive parents described years spent welcoming vulnerable children into stable homes. What they could not do was affirm a set of claims about human identity that they believed to be untrue and harmful to the very children they were trying to help.