A secular view of religious adoption

The article Brickbat: Ideological Impurity by Charles Oliver (Reason) writes,

“According to a social worker’s report, the two were asked how they would feel if a child in their care was LGBT. The two responded that they would still love the child, wouldn’t kick the child out, and wouldn’t subject the child to conversion therapy. But both opposed sex change treatments for those under 18 and expressed a reluctance to use pronouns that don’t reflect someone’s biological sex, and Catherine said it would be important for the child to remain chaste. The social worker recommended approval of their application with conditions for LGBT and religious issues, but DCF’s Licensing Review Team rejected the application.”

Look, I feel that this article would have been written differently if the couple had been Muslim and had expressed the exact same opinions. We have to be honest about the fact that we’re only getting annoyed about restrictions based on ideological grounds when those restrictions affect us. You know, … white, upstanding Christians.

People are getting butt-hurt because classically religious stances are being viewed as increasingly intolerant and as not fit for prospective adoptive parents. This is just one more case of people being incapable of understanding that norms change—and sometimes those that benefited for a long time will all of a sudden find themselves on the wrong end of the stick.

If the couple had said that they would beat their child if it misbehaved, almost no-one today would think it odd if they’d been rejected as adoptive parents. This would not have been a reason to reject those parents 60 years ago. Norms change.

If we’re being honest, it is perhaps not too much to ask that people who adopt a child agree to allow the child to develop in a normal, healthy way that works best for the child rather than a way that fits into the worldview of the parents. If a child is homosexual or trans, then it is preferable to have parents who would be understanding and flexible in that situation rather than just dropping the God-hammer. That was the original recommendation, if you read carefully.

But there are some restrictions that certainly raise eyebrows. Like, making sure the child is “chaste”, whatever the hell that means. I think everyone wants children to be chaste. Anything else is pedophilia. You don’t have to mention that one explicitly. So, the prospective mother must have meant chaste beyond the age that most people would consider it normal for a person to become sexually active in this day and age.

So for how much longer did Catherine expect chastity? Does the adopted child have to wait until it’s married? Does it get to make its own choices about when or whether or whom it marries? Religious couples tend to be very cultish and they’ve enjoyed a tremendously long period during which no-one ever called them on their bullshit because they could hide behind a holier-than-thou screen.

I think it’s OK to be a bit more leery of this level of fanaticism—seeing it for what it is. We don’t want to let fanatics adopt if we can help it. As I noted above, if the couple had been Muslim, the article would never have been written because it would have been obvious to everyone that Islamic proscriptions on child-rearing are not compatible with a modern society[1], whereas it’s only recently that secular societies have been calling Christians on the same kind of bullshit.