The Houston Archdiocese is challenging a federal rule which prohibits foster care providers from discriminating against LGBTQ people.
The Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston wants to become a foster care provider in Texas, but only if the Catholic organization is exempt from a federal rule meant to protect LGBT people from discrimination.
The archdiocese is teaming up with the Texas Attorney General’s office and the Department of Family and Protective Services to challenge the rule that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identify, and other characteristics.
This should be easy: “Nope. Sorry, padre, but you have to treat willing same-sex couples just as you would treat any other eligible couple.”
Certainly, a self-funded religious organization offering foster– and adoption-services should be able to enforce its beliefs — if it does business using only its own money. If is is funded with public monies, then it has to serve the entire public from whom the money came — including LGBTQ couples who, after all, put up some of the money being used. Seriously: Why should anybody be required to fund discrimination against themselves?
The role of LGBTQ people in society is one of those issues about which little compromise is ever likely; the Biblical condemnation is simply too definite and unambiguous to overlook. What is more it is encrusted with tradition and, since the Stonewall riot, a lot of ugly politics. Neither side is ever going to stand down.
However, the scientific research points definitely to the conclusion that the components of sexuality are hard-coded before birth and, rightly, that is what the overwhelming majority of educational institutions teach. Ultimately, then — not in my lifetime, or the lifetime of the majority of the readers of this blog — that discrimination will dwindle into a bad memory. Good. There are more important things to worry about than what the gentleman bachelors down the street get up to, and we should start, today, ignoring the ignorant busybodies who care.