Michael Schuttloffel is the executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference.
by Michael Schuttloffel
There was a time not long ago when almost every living human recognized that the ideal situation for a child was a home with a married mother and father.
Of course, the world being what it is this side of Eden, life’s messiness often intervened to thwart such arrangements.
In those cases, people did the best they could to deal with difficult circumstances, often through heroic efforts by single mothers.
But the ideal was a given, made obvious by the basic facts of biology and lived experience.
However, recent years have witnessed the swiftest social transformation in the history of mankind.
Without congressional hearings, or any other semblance of the proverbial “national conversation” one would expect from a democracy about to undertake such a dramatic rupture with 5,000 years of human civilization, it became suddenly understood that children do not need mothers and fathers.
Instead, they need only what arrangements adults want them to need. To hesitate in accepting the new dispensation became not merely out of date, but bigotry.
Thus it was that in 2006, Catholic Charities of Boston was forced to close its adoption ministry because it would only place children in homes where they would have a mother and a father.
After over 100 years of serving those in need and achieving a national reputation for placing the hardest-to-place kids, Catholic Charities’ policy that every child wants and deserves a mom and a dad was deemed discrimination by the state of Massachusetts. And they were shut down.
Similar closures have followed in Illinois, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The ACLU and other agents of militant secularism are on the warpath, determined to crush faith-based adoption ministries that operate according to religious principles they don’t like. The forces of love and tolerance will not rest until anyone who disagrees with them is reduced to the status of second-class citizenship.
In response, seven states have passed laws protecting faith-based adoption agencies. Kansas is considering similar legislation that needs your support, dear reader.
The bill before the Kansas Legislature does not in any way affect the legal right of same-sex couples to adopt children, which has been established nationwide.
What the legislation would do is ensure that faith-based adoption providers will not be punished by the government for operating according to their religious beliefs.
Consider that somewhere, there is a birth mother about to make the agonizing choice to let go of her child. Her final wish for her baby is a forever home where the child will be raised to share her religious beliefs, and will have the gift of a mom and a dad. Then there are those who would use the coercive power of the government to deny her this choice.
Whose side are you on?
Visit the website at: www.ProtectAdoptionChoice.org to learn more and contact your state representative and senator.
