Who Gets to Pick up the Trash?

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Clarissa

September 23, 2015

Clint McCormack knows that some people don’t think gay couples should be allowed to foster or adopt children. But it still stung when he called a religious adoption agency in Michigan and asked whether it would help him foster a child together with his partner, Bryan. “She was very rude, she basically hung up on me,” McCormack told me.

OK, and why did he have to call a religious agency, precisely? Because he really wants to adopt or because he is trying to prove a point? Do abandoned, traumatized children need to be used as a pretext in the ideological battles of adults?

The idea that instead of cakes and marriage licenses, children will be used in the battle over who is more self-righteous and victimized is deeply disturbing. The children, also known as “the trash that the straight people don’t want anymore”, become a club that both sides wave around, trying to hit the opponent.

If anybody really cared about the children here and put their interests first, such situations would not arise. Shame on everybody involved.

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7 responses to “Who Gets to Pick up the Trash?”

Evelina Anville

September 23, 2015

I agree it’s obnoxious that he called a religious agency. But why are religious agencies involved in adoption at all? I was under the impression that religious organizations can’t handle adoption?

At any rate, adoption is a civil matter that doesn’t need religion mixing in it. The only thing that adoption agencies should evaluate is the psychological health, empathetic capacity, and perhaps financial security of the prospective adoptive parents. Nothing else. I loathe when religion gets mixed in with procedures that should be driven by secular policy.

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1. Clarissa
  
  September 23, 2015
  
  Religious organizations are often involved in all sorts of beneficent organizations. As long as children are placed in families, the poor are fed, and the homeless are sheltered, what does it matter who does it? The governmental agencies in this country are notoriously overextended and charitable organizations have to step in.
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    September 23, 2015
    
    If religious organizations are making adoption placement decisions based on parental religious affiliation/”biblical fitness,” they using terrible and potentially dangerous criteria. There are plenty of religious people who will make terrible adoptive parents. (There are some wonderful religious parents of course but again religion shouldn’t factor in to placement decisions.)
    
    And adoption is a decision that can’t be undone. Once children are adopted, it will take a court emancipation to free them. This is a permanent change to the life of a minor. Feeding the hungry and sheltering the poor seem like different matters to me: a few meals or a few nights of temporary shelter don’t inescapably change someone’s life.
    
    Again, I agree with you that the gay couple in the original story seem to be grandstanding. I am troubled by the fact that they have already adopted something like 10 children and want to adopt still more. This isn’t about their desire to become loving parents but about their egos. So I’m actually happy they can’t adopt more. But I really do think religious organizations should not have any power when it comes to adoption placement.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      September 23, 2015
      
      From the point of view of the children’s welfare, it’s better for them to be in a family than not be in a family. Of course, unless we are talking about abusive families. But there is zero connection between whether a family is religious and whether it’s likely to be abusive.
      
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Dreidel

September 23, 2015

ALL religions are discriminatory in some aspects of their belief systems, and the right of those religions to discriminate is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution.

By extension, religious institutions providing services to the public can discriminate as they see fit, provided that they don’t receive public funds. (For example, Jewish rabbis aren’t required to conduct mixed marriages, and Catholic hospitals aren’t required to preform abortions.)

People can rant and call these religions insulting terms like “bigoted” and “immoral” all they want (That’s called freedom of speech), but in the U.S., the law is on the side of the various religions.

As a practical matter, all of the services offered by religious organizations (adoptions, dating services, charity events, etc.) are widely available in America from secular organizations who aren’t allowed to discriminate.

Clarissa’s right: In many highly publicized cases, activists are deliberately going to religious organizations to pick a fight.

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1. Clarissa
  
  September 23, 2015
  
  Exactly. I’m very supportive, for instance, of a Catholic hospital’s right not to perform abortions or IVFs, but only as long it doesn’t try to prevent the doctors from opening an office down the street and performing these services there.
  
  In all fairness, our local Catholic hospital is not interfering with what the doctors do as long as they do it off the premises. Even when “off the premises” is literally 50 feet away. And that’s civilized and normal.
  
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Jones

September 25, 2015

“OK, and why did he have to call a religious agency, precisely?”

Because within an adversarial legal system, in order to have a position for a challenge, you must first have what is referred to as standing, and in order to establish it, he has to have what we are meant to believe is some horribly egregious wrongful thing done to him …

Or we could go for the short version: he’s a “concern troll” who trolled a religious agency, getting precisely what he might expect as a troll of any kind.

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