Ever since she joined the New York Times last summer, Ruth Graham has been breaking stories left and right. Yesterday’s revelation of a revered Christian adoption agency agreeing to allow in gay parents is the latest of many.
Judging by her piece — and those of several other outlets — the decision must have been known for several days but was embargoed until that all-important email went out to the ministry’s staff.
Ever since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015, it was only a matter of time before these newly legalized couples wanted to adopt kids.
This time around, state officials could be supporting them and any agency not complying would stand to lose financially big time. The story begins:
One of the country’s largest adoption and foster care agencies, Bethany Christian Services, announced on Monday that it would begin providing services to L.G.B.T.Q. parents nationwide effective immediately, a major inflection point in the fraught battle over many faith-based agencies’ longstanding opposition to working with same-sex couples.
Bethany, a Michigan-based evangelical organization, announced the change in an email to about 1,500 staff members that was signed by Chris Palusky, the organization’s president and chief executive. “We will now offer services with the love and compassion of Jesus to the many types of families who exist in our world today,” Mr. Palusky wrote. “We’re taking an ‘all hands on deck’ approach where all are welcome.”
What that means is that the amount of orphans is so great and the number of available parents are so few, that anyone available –- even if gay, single, older, etc. –- is needed to adopt these kids.
The announcement is a significant departure for the 77-year-old organization, which is the largest Protestant adoption and foster agency in the United States. Bethany facilitated 3,406 foster placements and 1,123 adoptions in 2019, and has offices in 32 states. (The organization also works in refugee placement, and offers other services related to child and family welfare.) Previously, openly gay prospective foster and adoptive parents in most states were referred to other agencies.
The decision comes amid a high-stakes cultural and legal battle that features questions about sexuality, religious freedom, parenthood, family structure and theology.
Bethany’s doctrinal view that a family begins with the marriage of a man married to a woman was running into major hurdles with the preponderance of gay couples who, not wishing to go the artificial insemination route, wished to adopt.
Meanwhile, more than 20% of same-sex couples with children have an adopted child, compared to 3% of straight couples, according to a 2016 report from the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A. School of Law. Gay couples are also significantly likelier to have a foster child.
That’s a major market for adoption agencies; these are often people with what the experts call “walking around money.”
Speaking of which, Bethany was beginning to get the financial squeeze from the state.
Bethany’s informal policy became increasingly challenging for the organization in recent years, as various states and municipalities began requiring agencies to accept applications from L.G.B.T.Q. couples in order to maintain their government contracts.
Whereas a Catholic agency fought this policy in a case that’s gone all the way to the Supreme Court, Bethany has complied. Several branches have been quietly allowing gay parents to adopt and in January, its board voted to extend that policy to the entire organization.
The piece hit the right bases, including a critical comment from Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptists.
I realize the reporter had to assemble this article quickly, so one can’t get everything. But there are some interesting angles worth pursuing.
One is the reality of the looming Equality Act, discussed yesterday by tmatt, that would obliterate religious freedom for ministries, schools and parachurch groups in favor of gender rights. There’s a lot more to the adoption question than that, but there’s a definite threat looming and it’s fair to say that Bethany smelled the tea leaves on this one and acted accordingly. At least that’s how most of the folks commenting on this story in the Times saw it — as a money decision rather than, say, a Christian doctrine decision.
If it’s truly the latter, I’d like to hear more from the Bethany folks on how their thoughts on all this evolved. What was the internal process that led to this change? Did this require editing in what amounts to the organization’s mission or doctrinal statements? Bethany Christian Services has had a long history of connections to the Christian Reformed Church (click here for its teachings on homosexuality). Will that change?
Christianity Today also picked up on the story, adding a few factoids, such as Bethany’s change of heart being endorsed by three of its former executive directors. CT has been following the Bethany story for some time.
A Fox News report on the matter brought up another little-explored angle in this paragraph:
Nathan Bult, Senior Vice President of Public & Government Affairs at Bethany Christian Services says families look different than they did when the organization first started 75 years ago.
No kidding. I remember the days –- and we’re only talking 15 years ago –- when certain Christian adoption agencies were turning down single applicants for adoption, not to mention gay ones. I was one of those would-be parents and I was amazed at the mentality that would only allow two-parent heterosexual couples to adopt when there were an estimated 120 million orphans worldwide.
I did find an agency that would accept me, but several years after adopting my daughter, ran into the “orphan excellence” ideology in Christian circles that I describe in this 2014 blog post whereby only heterosexual couples are acceptable as parents. One of the chief proponents of this line of thought was the above-mentioned Moore, who has opposed single-parent adoption.
So there’s quite the history in recent Christian thought on what constitutes an acceptable family. (Note that I didn’t say “ideal.”) This issue is so much bigger than a decision by one agency to stay involved in the foster care/adoption scene even if they have to make compromises to do so. It has to do with the way families have changed; how people aren’t getting married like they once were; how formerly under-the-wraps sexual practices have erupted into our culture and how religious institutions are coming to grips with this.
Obviously, the Bethany folks felt they weren’t compromising with their biblical moorings by agreeing to work with gay parents or they felt that Jesus would have chosen to work with them and so should they. There were a lot of commentators for the Times piece criticizing these folks for their slow rates of change but remember, Bethany’s brand was based on the kinds of parents it had available for adoption.
There are questions that remain. How will this decision change their brand? For instance, are the gay couples adopting through Bethany expected to sign some sort of faith commitment? And if the child is older, what if he or she doesn’t want two mommies or two daddies — or even a single parent? Does that child get to choose?
There’s a lot of room for follow-up. What are other Christian groups, such as the Christian Alliance for Orphans, saying? Both their Twitter feed and site are pretty silent. There’s a lot of Christian adoption agencies out there, making it easy for reporters to localize a story. I’m betting there’s major pushback and that some agencies are waiting to see how the Supreme Court rules before making their move.
If you need some really heart-rending statistics, look into the numbers of children in U.S. foster care these days — more than 400,000 — with an average age of 8.3 years. Adoption these days often doesn’t look like swooping down to a hospital where a birth mom has just delivered and making off with a newborn. I’m guessing that Bethany was very aware of these statistics and decided the biblical prohibitions against gay sex weren’t the hill they wanted to die on when it comes to finding homes for these kids.