States move to protect religious families who foster, adopt

As Kansas legislators drafted a recent foster care bill, a family accused officials of prohibiting them in 2019 from fostering due to their religious views, according to Brittany Jones from the advocacy organization Kansas Family Voice. Jones, the group’s director of policy engagement, said the family later fostered through a private organization, but the process cost them thousands of dollars more.

Also in 2019, months after Gov. Laura Kelly took office, the Kansas Department for Children and Families drafted a policy that would have required foster families to agree with a child’s gender identity regardless of their sex. While Kelly’s administration never finalized the policy, Kansas Family Voice wanted to take preemptive steps to ensure religious families would be protected when trying to help some of the 6,000 children in Kansas foster care.

“You’ve got families who just love the Lord and want to take care of kids,” Jones said. “The government wants their faith when it’s compelling them to take care of kids, but the minute that it contradicts the LGBTQ belief system and the government’s belief system on that, they reject these families.”

Last week, Kansas as well as Arkansas passed bills that safeguard religious families’ rights to participate in state adoption and foster care programs.

On Thursday, Kansas lawmakers overrode a governor’s veto of a bill that seeks to protect families who have “sincerely held religious or moral beliefs regarding sexual orientation or gender identity” from discrimination by the state’s child welfare system. The measure prevents the state from requiring potential foster and adoptive parents to go along with a child’s attempts to identify as a gender that doesn’t match their sex.

The new bill also establishes a legal right for religious families to be able to seek “damages, injunctive relief, costs, and reasonable attorney fees” from the Kansas Department for Children and Families if it violates the law.

Earlier this year, the House and Senate easily passed the legislation and sent it to Democrat Gov. Laura Kelly, who vetoed it on April 3. The governor argued the bill “further complicates” children’s lives and could expose the state to “frivolous lawsuits.” Last week, the House and Senate overrode the veto with votes of 87-38 and 31-9, respectively.

On Thursday, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill similar to the Kansas measure.

Kansas and Arkansas have created these bills to ensure religious families are freely able to adopt or foster, said Greg Chafuen, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom.

While families have parental and religious freedom rights to freely foster or adopt children regardless of their beliefs, a growing number of states are targeting these families, Chafuen said. Some states prevent families from caring for children under the state’s supervision because the families hold traditional views on sexuality and gender.

Last summer, two couples in Vermont sued the state after it revoked their foster care licenses because of their religious views that “girls cannot become boys or vice versa.” A district court denied their motion for a preliminary injunction in February.

In April 2023, single mother Jessica Bates filed a lawsuit against Oregon after officials said she was not eligible to adopt because she did not agree with the state’s views on gender identity. A court of appeals heard oral arguments for Bates’ case in July 2024.

Couples have filed similar lawsuits in Massachusetts and Washington.

Following last week’s laws, 15 states offer various amounts of protection against religious discrimination for families or faith-based adoption providers, according to an ADF report.

“States, I think, are wise to pass laws like this to make sure that families know that they can be foster parents, they can be adoptive parents,” Chafuen said. “And it’s very important that [states] tell their citizens that they can keep their faith while they do so.”

Last week’s bill was “straightforward,” said Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson. It simply ensures that officials don’t implement ideology in programs that aim to ensure kids have food and safe homes.

“Those kids are just in their most vulnerable state, right? They are just in need. For the government to apply some type of ideology to that, it’s like forced indoctrination,” Masterson said. “We just have to protect the kids.”