(LifeSiteNews) — A pair of Christian foster families in Massachusetts is suing the state for barring them from fostering more children based on their refusal to affirm gender confusion among kids in their care.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is representing Nick and Audrey Jones, who have cared for seven small children since 2023; and Greg and Marianelly Schrock, who have cared for 28 since 2019. Despite both couples effectively providing needed, loving homes without incident, the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families (DCF) decided they cannot continue to do so unless willing to affirm the gender confusion of future kids placed with them, including support for “gender transitioning” and use of preferred pronouns.
This, ADF says, is a violation of foster parents’ religious freedom under the First Amendment as well as a reckless rejection of needed homes for orphaned or abandoned children.
“Massachusetts’ foster care system is in crisis: The commonwealth has more than 1,400 children who are waiting to be placed with a loving family. Yet Massachusetts is putting its ideological agenda ahead of the needs of these suffering kids,” said ADF Senior Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse. “This is a particularly egregious case because the Joneses care for a little girl who is happy and healthy in the only home she’s ever known. Now just because of the Joneses’ commonly held religious beliefs, the commonwealth says the Joneses are unfit to parent and is threatening to uproot this little child. That’s not putting children first and that’s why we’re suing the commonwealth in federal court.”
It is a dictate of progressivism that gender is no more than a matter of self-perception that individuals are free to change at will. But according to biology, sex is not a subjective sense of self but an objective scientific reality, established by an individual’s chromosomes from their earliest moments of existence and reflected by hundreds of genetically-based characteristics.
Yet for years LGBT activists have worked to promote “gender fluidity,” the idea that sexual identity is separate from biology and discernible only by personal perception, across public education, libraries, health care, and cultural traditions such as school homecomings and athletic competitions.
Critics warn that their efforts have yielded a wide array of harms, both to the physical and mental health of gender-confused individuals themselves as well as to the rights, health, and safety of those who disagree, such as girls and women forced to share intimate facilities with males, female athletes forced to compete against males with natural physical advantages, and individuals forced to affirm false sexual identities in violation of their consciences, scientific fact, and/or their religious beliefs.
President Donald Trump has issued executive orders to deny federal funds to medical and educational entities that promote gender ideology, which so far has gotten numerous major hospital systems to cease “transition” procedures on minors.
