(LifeSiteNews) — The Massachusetts Department of Children & Families (DCF) has softened its approach to foster parents who dissent from LGBT orthodoxy, after months of legal battles over fit families who suddenly found themselves ineligible over their religious beliefs.
In September, LifeSiteNews reported that Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) was 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, 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.
The following month, LifeSite covered Lydia and Heath Marvin, who currently have three teens and have fostered eight kids under age four since 2020, yet lost their license in April when they refused to sign DCF’s LGBTQIA+ Non-Discrimination Policy, which requires of foster families “ability and willingness to support and affirm LGBTQIA+ children placed in their care.” They appealed the judgment but were denied. The Marvins had not yet settled on a next move at the time of that report.
“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,” ADF Senior Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse has previously noted.
Now, however, the Washington Post reports that on December 12, DCF filed an emergency regulation to change the language from requiring support for “a child’s sexual orientation or gender identity” to the more open-ended “child’s individual identity and needs.”
“When I asked DCF for comment, a spokesperson told me the department will consider a family’s ability to support LGBTQ youth when placing children, not when licensing foster families,” the Post’s Carine Hajjar reports. “The spokesperson said this change means that religious couples are eligible to apply — or reapply — to serve as foster parents regardless of their beliefs.”
ADF is interpreting the change as a “major step in the right direction,” while pledging to keep a close eye on how Massachusetts implements it.
“We commend Massachusetts officials for changing course,” ADF president, CEO, and chief counsel Kristen Waggoner said. “The case will remain open until we are confident that Massachusetts is fully committed to respecting the First Amendment and prioritizing children’s most urgent need: not gender ideology, but loving families.”
The Post further notes that the development follows the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals granting a preliminary injunction to a foster mother battling a similar policy in Oregon, and the federal Administration for Children and Families admonishing both states for rejecting parents “solely because they cannot, in good conscience, commit to affirming a hypothetical child’s gender identity.”
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.
