Yesterday, I wrote about the push for Evangelicals and Focus on the Family allies to become more proactive about adoptions and foster care. I mentioned some lingering problems and doubts about how that will work out. I ended with an outrageous, but true, quotation. Simplistically summaried both sides , the states and the Evangelicals , have fears about all this:
link "Sharen Ford, a Colorado Division of Child Welfare Services manager, said some county workers initially presumed "church people beat their kids" or protested the initiative was exclusively Christian. Families, meanwhile, worried they couldn't take children to church or discipline them at all.
To start, all those pesky rules and proactive efforts of the state to protect the interest of the child in placing children in foster care and for adoption, will be a problem. Recall past history here in Texas with such things as this:
link PROBE OF ABUSE CHARGES AT "BIBLE DISCIPLINE" HOME LEADS TO BUSH, RAISES QUESTIONS OF FAITH-STATE PARTNERSHIP
" Trouble began, though, in 1971 when the Texas Department of Public Welfare (later the Texas Department of Human Services) informed Roloff that the youth "homes" must meet certain licensing standards. Roloff, citing the separation of church and state, refused to comply, and after a lengthy court battle the homes were temporarily shut down in October, 1973. Roloff ended up in jail, but the Texas Supreme Court finally ruled in his favor.Passage of the Texas Child Care and Licensing Act in 1975 put Roloff back in the public spotlight, and once again the combative evangelist was locked in a legal battle with state authorities. "
Clearly what is being proposed is NOT seperate orphanages, etc. Rather it is temporary foster care and adoptions. But the issues are the same. Roloff's work continues to this day as far as I can see by my search on the net. It is supervised , thanks to Gov. Bush, by a seperate, private agency, Texas Association of Christian Child Care Agencies Inc., whose only charge is the Roloff institutions.
All of this, of course, represents an extreme case. It makes the conflict blatant and clear. I am not, however, arguing that most of these probably well meaning people will be abusing their children. I am arguing that their vision of what is proper and what the secular law says may well be at odds.
What happens when someone's "biblically sanctioned" child raising practices run afoul of the secular rules laid down by Child Protective Services? If the children in question were under the care of their own parents, this question would be less sharply drawn, since state intervention is limited to cases of clear neglect and abuse. Not so when we are talking about foster care, not so when we are chosing adoptive parents.
Salon provides clear evidence for these kinds of conflict as it runs the entire AP report:
link
In Colorado and other states, the rules are firm on disciplining foster children, some of whom have been badly mistreated: no physical contact is allowed. Because corporal punishment is common among many evangelical parents, alternatives such as loss of privileges and "time outs" are urged, Ford said.
Let's leave aside matters of discipline. How about
evangelizing,....gay and lesbian foster children, racially mixed families...
?
I must admit, I don't see the issue with evangelizing. If the child is in the care of properly vetted parents, they would appear to have the right to bring them up in the faith tradition of their choosing. I guess the issue would arise with older children who might have already been incorporated into a different tradition.
To wit:
link Focus on the Family president Jim Daly wrote supporters that he hopes the orphan-care effort "will not only equip God's people to help meet the physical needs of orphans worldwide, but will ultimately introduce them to the eternal hope that is found in Jesus Christ."
Generally, foster children can be taken to places of worship unless parents who maintain legal rights say otherwise, but forcing religion on foster children is not allowed.
As to the issue of mixed race families, this:
link Organizers also are up front about another complication: The churches targeted by the campaign are predominantly white, while the majority of foster-care children are minorities. Paul Pennington, who heads an orphan initiative through FamilyLife, a Little Rock, Ark.-based evangelical group, said parents need to brace for stares and other less-than-accepting behavior from families around them.
The South, ( is it just the South???) revisits its racial problems again? But I digress....
What happens if FOF people decide to challenge their exclusion from certain foster home or adopation placements on the basis of their religiosly rooted convictions being at variance with state law or state agency policies? What happens if they call it religious discrmination? You know how much they like to pay the martyr card. I don't know how the courts would rule, do you?
Sadly, such issues will obscure stories like this, where the politics don't matter:
link For Matt and Kristen Donovan, abortion and same-sex adoption politics didn't factor in their decision to become foster parents. After experiencing two miscarriages in the past year, the suburban Dallas couple decided it was time to expand their family beyond their 3-year-old biological daughter.
The couple worried about bureaucratic red tape. But they also felt tugged by adoption metaphors in the Bible. Now, they share their home with a 4-month-old foster child after receiving training from Irving Bible Church.
"Our church is very much our community," said Matt Donovan, a 26-year-old graphic designer. "Having the church involved made this a journey we didn't have to take on our own.""
As heart warming as this story is, it cannot wipe away the swarm of hard questions to be answered.
In sum, I really am glad these guys have come forward to help with orphans, I just don't see how this will work out, especially when they began claiming biblical precedents in support of their child rearing practices and decisions. What room for accomodation and compromise is there then? Is the Bush precedent, set up a separate , exclusively "Christian" private supervisory agency going to be replicated and expanded here in Texas? In the nation??
And of course, there is still the problem of all those other children who are not ophans, just poor living with parents who are poor, going to public schools being systematically gutted by good compassionate allies of the FOF crowd. Oh and in Texas, don't forget all those kids thrown off of CHIPS (Childern's Health and Insurance Program) by bureaucratic red tape designed to punish their neer-do-well parents!
If the adopation and foster care initiative is just the first step in reaching out on the broader range of children in need , great. But I just don't see that happening. The core principles of FOF and its allies tells them that government aid is evil, that private charity is the only proper way to help the poor.
That this is inadequate in scope and coverage is simply not something FOF and its allies can even concieve of, it is outside of their conceptual universes. Recall Lakoff's observation:
link
Moral Politics Conservatives fear that nurturers are wasting money by not doing their jobs well (teachers); waste and mismanagement (health care) or that the unworthy poor (welfare cheats, addicts. bums) are getting care they don't deserve because of their own faults."