I’m always amazed how, once news organizations discover an ultra-conservative religious group, they treat it as so much fresh meat to be chomped on again and again.

Such is Miracle Hill, a Christian foster care and adoption agency in South Carolina that is getting endless coverage about how biased and crazy it is to only allow Protestants to adopt kids through this organization.

I wrote about them last fall when other media were going after Miracle Hill and how the local paper, The Greenville News, explained there are 10 other adoption agencies in the state that take all comers.

Yet, in USA Today, we’re hearing about Miracle Hill again, this time the target of the ire of a Catholic mom.

Aimee Maddonna, 34, a South Carolina mother of three, was turned away by a state-funded foster care agency because she is Catholic.

Maddonna went to Miracle Hill Ministries in Greenville, the state’s largest foster care outlet, asking to volunteer in hopes of one day becoming a foster parent. But the initial screening was cut short after she was asked the name of her church.

“I said, ‘Our Lady of the Rosary,’ and her exact words were, ‘You sound like you’d be the perfect mentor, but we only accept Protestant Christians.”

“Saying that the majority of the population is not suitable only because of their religion ... that’s archaic,” Maddonna said.

There are serious church-state issues here, since state funds are involved. It’s one thing to operate as a nonprofit and something else to be a nonprofit that gets tax dollars. The question is whether there are other state-assisted nonprofits with policies that affect who can, and who cannot, use their services. Are religious doctrines uniquely bad?

Reading further down, we get to the trends the article is most concerned about. This passage is long, but stay with me.

There are at least nine other states that have passed laws allowing child placement agencies to turn away anyone who doesn’t match their religious beliefs or moral convictions, including same-sex couples.