Tim Daniels
(ZENIT News / Washington, 12.05.2023).- The new policy being promoted in the Department of Health and Human Services of the Biden Administration could make explicit support for gender and transgender orthodoxy a necessary condition for adoptive and foster parenthood. This regulation, proposed in late September, recently reached the deadline for public comments on adoption and child care.
According to the new provisions, the lack of “affirmation” by adoptive or foster parents of the preferred gender of the adopted child would be considered a form of child abuse, and as a result, these parents would be denied adoption or care. If this reflection becomes a mandatory federal norm, child protection agencies, including adoption and foster care agencies, could systematically apply it, reinterpreting the federal law on social security, which requires agencies to ensure that every child in foster care receives “safe and adequate” care.
The regulation details the measures agencies must take to meet this requirement for “LGBTQI+” children, defined as those who “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning, intersex, as well as children who are non-binary or have a non-conforming gender identity or expression.” Before agencies entrust a child to an adoptive parent, controversially labeled as a “provider,” that person is expected to “create an environment free of hostility, abuse, or mistreatment based on the LGBTQI+ status of the child”; undergo training “to be prepared with the knowledge and skills to meet the needs of the minor related to the self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression”; and be able to “facilitate the child’s access to age-appropriate resources, services, and activities that support their health and well-being.”
Although the new regulation does not define what is meant by hostility, abuse, or mistreatment, it clarifies that “a provider attempting to weaken, suppress, or change a child’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, even through the use of so-called ‘conversion therapy,’ would not be a safe and appropriate person.” The proposed regulation cites medical associations such as the American Psychological Association to argue that efforts to “undermine, suppress, or change” sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression “are not supported by evidence and are considered harmful.”
With the new regulation proposed by the Biden Administration, any potential adoptive parent seeking to protect a child from sexual confusion and the pressures of gender and transgender ideology could be expelled from the foster care and adoption program.
Despite the new regulation asserting that children in the foster care system are more likely to identify as LGBTQI+, i.e., to face gender confusion, Biden wants to prohibit Christian parents from adopting them based on their religious beliefs, doctrinal teachings, and biblical principles, thus opposing the LGBTQI+ ideology.
“In response to the radical proposal from the Biden Administration, 19 Republican attorneys general are pushing for a reversal of the new regulation that, according to them, would effectively exclude Christian families from foster care and endanger the foster care system nationwide,” Fox News reported recently. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, along with 18 of his Republican colleagues from other states, including Tennessee’s Jonathan Skrmetti, sent a letter on Monday, November 27, to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) denouncing that the regulation alters requirements for foster families, violates the Constitution, and discriminates against those who hold a biblical view of sexuality and biological gender.
Federal Health Secretary (HHS) Xavier Becerra reiterated that all of this “will change the way we view foster care for our adoptive children, but, more importantly, the way we view the people we trust to care for foster children.”
