Feb 19
Whose Freedom of Religion?
Terry H. Schwadron
Feb. 19, 2022
The only good thing about our ever-present culture wars is that they keep creating their own new skirmishes. We’re never kept in suspense as we are by a looming shooting war over troops massed at the Ukraine-Russia border.
This one hails from Tennessee, where a couple has tried to become foster parents with the intent to adopt a boy from Florida but have been denied the chance by a state-sponsored training program because they are Jewish.
The program, which is run by the Holston United Methodist Home for Children, receives state Department of Children’s Services funds to do its foster and adoptive parent training. But, as court documents say, the program Just as the program was to get under way, the agency rejected Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram saying that they were disqualified.
The agency, the only one near to the couple to provide services for out-of-state placements, sent a rejection email that read: “As a Christian organization, our executive team made the decision several years ago to only provide adoption services to prospective adoptive families that share our belief system in order to avoid conflicts or delays with future service delivery.”
Holston, a religious organization, receives taxpayer money to support programs to assist families with foster-care placement, training and other related services.
On to Court
So, once again, this has become a lawsuit, the apparent fate of culture war confrontations, just at a time when the U.S. Supreme Court is expanding the rights of those claiming religious fervor for supremacy over a variety of more common rules and regulations.
The couple, joined by the Americans United for Separation of Church and State, claims violation of its religious freedoms. Brad Williams, president and chief executive of Holston, claimed his agency’s religious rights to ensure that children end up with families that agree with its faith.
The couple then reached out to other child-placing agencies in their county, but none would help them get the certification for an out-of-state adoption.
I’m just wondering whether we are forgetting that there are children who need adopting, particularly as the very same people push for ending legal abortion.
For background, this lawsuit comes two years after Tennessee Gov. Brad Lee, a Republican, signed a bill giving legal protection to taxpayer-funded foster care and adoption agencies that deny services based on religion or sexual orientation. Similar laws also exist in states including Texas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Virginia.
This lawsuit argues this law violates the Tennessee Constitution’s religious-freedom and equal-protection guarantees.
Strong Opinions
In a CNN guest column, Maggie Siddiqi, senior director of religion and faith at the Center for American Progress, and Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, an author and fellow there, argue that “in multiple states, right-wing Christians are turning religious freedom on its head, distorting it into a license to violate religious freedom, by discriminating against religious minorities, the nonreligious and other Americans who hold beliefs that differ from theirs.”
The authors noted that as a Muslim and a gay man, the same agency likely would have rejected them as well.
As with other parts of the culture war that is defining our divides as a nation, rather than treating religious freedom as a treasured American value for multiple forms of practice, they see this incident as part of an attempt to redefine religious freedom to promote a growing Christian nationalist movement. They see Christian nationalism is, as Georgetown professor Paul D. Miller writes, a “political ideology” rather than a religious one, that seeks “to define America as a Christian nation.”
In so doing, there is a recognizable effort to define who cannot be a part of America — namely, non-Christians, as well as others who do not fit within the movement’s cultural template — such as people of color, immigrants and LGBTQ people, they argue. “Make no mistake: Christian nationalism is the opposite of religious freedom. What these right-wing actors advocate for is not religious freedom, but rather the ability of some Christians to be exempted from laws that don’t conform to their theology.”
Or restated, there are questions here about when your religious freedom runs into my lifestyle choices or ethnicity or race — whether we are talking about vaccination policies, school choice or equal standing before the law.
Is It Necessary?
This exclusion case seems unnecessary on its face. Perhaps because it has ended in a court filing, no one here is talking solutions, just insisting on positions.
In South Carolina, a Protestant child welfare agency that receives taxpayer funding turned away a Catholic woman and a Jewish woman from serving as a foster child mentor, changing its policies only after a lawsuit.
As with white supremacy arguments, there’s an assumption that state-funded services need not support all, just those who are in the club, whether by race, religion, gender or identity. Meanwhile, the real world is experiencing alarming rises in hate crimes, racial tensions over disparate policing policies, access to schools and in hiring and promotions in business. There has been a rise in violence as well.
“It’s infuriating to learn our tax dollars are funding discrimination against us,” Gabriel Rutan-Ram said. “If an agency is getting tax money to provide a service, then everyone should be served — it shouldn’t matter whether you’re Jewish, Catholic or an atheist. We’re all citizens of Tennessee, regardless of our religion.” Holston counters,
Holston Home places children with families that agree with our statement of faith, and forcing Holston Home to violate our beliefs and place children in homes that do not share our faith is wrong and contrary to a free society,”
The Tennessee Department of Children’s Services has not commented,
Over the past few months, the couple has been fostering a teenage girl and are in the process of adopting her. They plan to foster and adopt at least one more child. Their lawyer never got a response to the allegation that the agency had violated the state constitution.
Instead, Holston sued the Biden administration, “challenging a federal regulation that prohibits discrimination on the basis of age, disability, sex, race, color, national origin, religion, gender identity, and sexual orientation in programs funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,” according to the Rutan-Rams’ lawsuit.
And the U.S. Supreme Court’s solid conservative majority has shown itself to be very receptive to a push to expand particular religious efforts in education and health care.
Are we asking the right questions?
##
