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The following is excerpted from Gillian Friedman of the Deseret News. To read the full article, click here.
Academics and advocates took first steps recently toward what they hope will be solutions to a high-stakes clash that has dragged child welfare into the culture war over LGBT and religious rights.
Signaling a willingness on the part of religious groups to find a solution, an attorney who had represented faith-based adoption agencies in legal conflicts with LGBT groups declared same-sex couples should not be prevented from fostering or adopting children.
“Gay couples can be fantastic parents and should not be banned from adopting or fostering children,” Stephanie Barclay, former legal counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and now an associate law professor at Brigham Young University, said at a conference last week sponsored by the Cato Institute.
Another law professor offered the solution of government certificates that could shield same-sex couples from feelings of humiliation brought from rejection by a faith-based adoption agency that won’t accept LGBT clients.
But the legal director of a leading gay rights advocacy group was skeptical of how these solutions would play out in the real world, where adoption agency workers and same-sex couples interact.
To read the full article, click here.
ViolaJuly 29, 2018
The church's stand on homosexuality is becoming confusing. Do we support the gay lifestyle or not? The comment by the BYU law professor goes against all that the church has said about gay marriage. It bothers me that she would teach such opinions at a church school. If the homosexual lifestyle is against church standards, we should not support gay couples adopting children. It is hard for heterosexual parents to adopt, and there are many who want to. They should have first priority.
CHARLIEBROWN2292July 28, 2018
What the LGBT community does not want to admit - and instead claims the contrary through the publishing of biased and self-serving surveys - is that children raised by same-sex couples suffer from an emotional and social trauma that could be avoided if they were raised by the many qualified heterosexual couples who seek to adopt. Some more reliable studies on the subject can be found in www.heritage.org So, with all due respect to gay people, their wishes cannot be granted if they clash with the welfare of society as a whole. I am grateful that Catholics were able to stand firm in not compromising their moral standards, and am somewhat disappointed to see some BYU Professors supporting the adoption of children by gay parents.