News
2006-03-11
Catholic Church
shutters adoption agency to spite gays
Mass. Catholic
bishops turn backs on children
Determined not to
treat gay parents equally, as
The Boston
archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church announced Friday it
would turn its back on children who need homes rather than
continue to consider gay parents as equal to
straights, as Massachusetts state law demands. Once
its current contract with the state expires, the church's
Catholic Charities will stop providing adoption services in
explicit protest of the state's refusal to allow it to
discriminate against gay and lesbian potential
parents, The Boston Globe reported.
Catholic
Charities has provided hundreds of children with new homes
during its approximately 20 years of work with the state,
including a number of children placed with gay or
lesbian parents.
The state's
Catholic bishops, who oversee the charity, had asked for an
exemption to the antidiscrimination law that demands the
group treat all potential parents equally.
Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a Republican
widely thought to have presidential aspirations, sided with
the bishops but could not himself provide the exemption,
which would have required legislative approval.
The church's
crusade against equality for gays and lesbians and the
state's insistence on equal treatment created "a dilemma we
cannot resolve," the president and the chairman of
Catholic Charities' board of trustees said in a
statement. The group therefore elected to resolve the
dilemma at the expense of homeless children. Despite that
decision, the statement insisted, "At all times we
sought to place the welfare of children at the heart
of our work."
"Today's decision
by Boston's Catholic Charities to cease their adoption
assistance program that once secured safe, caring, and
loving homes for hundreds of children is a tragedy for
the children they served," countered Jennifer
Chrisler, executive director of Family Pride, an
advocacy group for LGBT-led families. "Rather than
expanding the opportunities for children in need by allowing
adoption by gay and lesbian couples whom credible
research in the last 25 years has proved fully capable
of raising well-adjusted children, they have opted
instead to deny any children access to their long-standing
tradition of excellent work in this field."
(Advocate.com)
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