Gov't Threatens To Close Adoption Agency Because They Only Consider Homes With Traditional Families
A private charity that receives no government funding, New Hope Family Services, provides approximately 1,500 counseling sessions per year to women with unplanned pregnancies in the Syracuse, New York, area.
The people at New Hope come from a pro-life point of view. Although they frame adoption as a loving option, New Hope does not pressure women to choose adoption. The agency equally encourages women to feel empowered to parent their children.
And the Empire State government is trying to shut New Hope down, according to a complaint New Hope has filed against the state in the U.S. District Court of New York.
What has New Hope done to incur the wrath of the state?
Although New Hope helps women and families of all backgrounds, straight or gay, it only places children with married couples. You know, married couples. As in the biblical sense of one man and one woman. Who are married.
According to the agency’s court filing, there has never been a complaint against New Hope from a same-sex or unmarried couple about its practices. “On information and belief, no same-sex couple or unmarried couple who has inquired with New Hope about adoption has ever complained to OCFS about how New Hope handled their inquiry,” the agency wrote.
And is this the only game in town? No. There are other private and state options by which gay people may adopt.
Are there children in need of adoption? Yes. But it is apparently more important to be PC-compliant than to place children in loving, adoptive homes. New York’s priorities are so incredibly backward that it is actively hunting down people who help the situation but come from a Judeo-Christian motive.
The changes in New York are coming at a head-spinning pace.
As reported in the complaint, until 2010, it was illegal for adoption providers in New York to place children for adoption with any couple except “an adult husband and his adult wife.”
When the legislature first authorized unmarried and same-sex partners to adopt in 2010, the governor at the time, David Patterson, noted in his approval statement that “the statute is permissive” rather than mandatory, and thus “would allow for such adoptions without compelling any agency to alter its present policies,” the complaint states.
And the legislation itself has not changed.
What has changed is the increased chutzpah of the bureaucrats in charge of protecting children in New York. These bureaucrats, not legislators, changed the regulations and, according to the complaint, sent a little love letter to those pathetic Judeo-Christian plebes at New Hope: Violate your religious beliefs — and forfeit your First Amendment rights — or stop serving children in need.
Obviously, there can be no alternative to the liberal way of doing things in the state of New York in 2018. The state must have full control and must not be shown up by the success of a God-fearing adoption agency.
After all, New Hope has already placed over 1,000 children for adoption in loving homes, according to the complaint.
New York’s Office of Children and Family Services is interfering with a privately funded charity’s ability to place children with the adoptive parents of the birth mothers’ choice. Yes, many birth mothers happen to want to choose the faith of the adoptive couple. Many birth mothers happen to want to choose a married, man-woman couple.
Knowing their babies will go to a good home could well convince a woman in a crisis pregnancy not to have an abortion. Charities like New Hope keep babies alive.
But standing up for homosexual marriage is apparently more important than that in the liberal state of New York.
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