Michigan Court Overturns State Law Protecting Christian Adoption Agencies
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) – A Michigan court recently overturned a 2015 law that allowed state-contracted Christian adoption agencies to decline placing children with same-sex adoptive parents.
The decision, the result of a settlement to a 2017 dispute involving two lesbian couples who claimed Bethany Christian Services and St. Vincent Catholic Charities had rejected them as adoptive parents, was helmed by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, who is herself a lesbian and played an instrumental role in overturning Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban in 2015.
Nessel celebrated “having more adoption agencies which don’t discriminate” in a tweet.
Chris Palusky, President and CEO of Bethany Christian services, judged the cost of not working with the government for the sake of principle to be too high, as the new decision requires all agencies, regardless of religious conviction, to be willing to place children with same-sex couples on pain of not receiving funding or contracts from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.
“The fact of the matter is that the government runs the foster care system. We cannot serve foster children without contracting with the state,” he said in a statement at Christianity Today. “So we faced a choice: Continue caring for hurting children in foster care or let our disappointment with government requirements supersede our compassion for kids who have suffered and need a loving family.”
While a 2015 Michigan state law passed by Governor Rick Snyder mandated that “a child-placing agency shall not be required to provide any services if those services conflict with, or provide any services under circumstances that conflict with, the child placing agency’s sincerely held religious beliefs,” the settlement to the lawsuit determined that federal non-discrimination requirements overruled it.