Give them all an “F,” a dunce cap, and enroll them to academic probation. That’s my verdict on the main foster/adoption players in Illinois.
Readers here know my reasons for flunking the Church. It has allowed an anti-gay mist to cloud its vision of adoption opportunities. Bishops threaten their employees with pink slips when what they should be doing is retooling their Catholic Charities social workers to develop new outreaches to prospective parents. It may well be that the Church doesn’t want to place kids in their care with same-sex couples, cohabiting couples, non-Catholic couples, or single people of any size, shape, or color.
Fine.
If these alternatives are such a bane on child-rearing, let’s step up with a host of couples the Church does consider appropriate. And let the money saved from international adoption and domestic legal and surrogacy and IVF expenses fund as much of these diocesan efforts as possible. And toss in some of the anti-homosexual lobbying cash too.
Boo too on the state of Illinois. Kendall Marlowe, from the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services:
We don’t want to see them leave the field, but the law has changed in Illinois and all child welfare agencies have to respect civil unions.
Fair enough. The law is the law. And the Church has no standing to take money to participate in a system it deems morally problematic. We’ll just retool for another ministry.
More from Mr Marlowe, who’s talking about shifting a few thousand foster kids to another placement:
While it may be unfortunate that we have to make this transition, we will be able to make this transition without significant disruption for these children.
…
Marlowe said the state should be able to place those children into new foster homes by the fall. The children would be moved to homes licensed by the 45 other private agencies with whom the state works.
Failing grade in red marker here, too.
Illinois should let the current placements come to a proper sunset. Ideally that would be adoption into a permanent home. Preferably sooner rather than later.
Foster care placements are a pre-existing condition in this matter. It’s up to the state, in the best interests of the children, to make this work legally and to the satisfaction of all concerned. Especially the kids. It stands yet to be proved that either the Church’s or the state’s stance here is of more benefit to kids. But we know multiple foster placements are harmful. If the failing students in this classroom of life don’t realize this, better for all concerned they just absent themselves from involvement with kids without parents, admit they don’t have their s*** together, and find another line of work.
20 August 2011 at 9:54 am
Perhaps “anti-gay mist” is better viewed as “pro-normal clarity”. No matter how you cut it, placing kids in a “home” with homosexual parents is bad for them, and bad for us. It’s another step in the steady march of incrementally convincing everyone to accept perversion.
20 August 2011 at 12:09 pm
So you say.
But what I’ve seen with my own eye says something else. I’ve seen Catholic gay and lesbian couples adopt a variety of infants and youths with severe disabilities who were otherwise “unadoptable” or bounced repeatedly in the foster system, et cet., and those parents saved those lives. It was an incredible pro-life witness.
20 August 2011 at 6:41 pm
Come to my parish in San Francisco (www.mhr.org) and Liam’s experience will be repeated substantially.
20 August 2011 at 6:43 pm
The only thing “bad for us” is unsubstantiated fear of the effects of love on children from parents who aren’t in the Ozzie and Harriet mold. And way too many of those who fit the mold are unwilling to adopt any child that doesn’t fit their dream of middle class American perfection to a “T”.
20 August 2011 at 6:51 pm
And, lest we forget, the Nelsons also had their problems….
20 August 2011 at 9:14 pm
Thre real problem is that the Church has grown into the nasty habit of accepting money from the state to provide its services. The Church has a place in the public square. Denying this place is not what is meant by ‘separation of Church and State.” But the Church has a reciprical obligation to separate itself from the trough of public funding in order to maintain its doctrinal and social-service integrity. I don’t want the government having any coercive influence over the Church by demanding that we teach that Joey can “have two daddies” in order to provide subsidized adoption services or a school lunch or a bus ride or a textbook. As long as the Church and State have this relationship, that’s where we end up getting a spineless and impotent USCCB working inside the beltway… that’s how we end up with Catholic colleges that are indistinguishable from public institutions… that’s how we end up with the meaningless platitudes of the “Faithful Citizenship” document… that’s how that gaggle of sisters get co-opted by the administration to be a “Catholic” presence in favor of the passage of Obamacare… that’s how we have abortion-on-demand as the law of the land for 40 embarassing years.
21 August 2011 at 7:00 am
You make a decent point about the Church accepting public money. Yet your point suffers by aiming way beyond the issue at hand, including medical insurance reform.
The biggest item you’ve missed might be the choice of nearly every bishop to engage in the legal process in defending the indefensible in the sex abuse cover-up scandal. Are you prepared to take your wide aim to a logical next step and recommend bishops fire their lawyers and instead come to the laity in full contrition with details of their role, and that of their predecessors) in covering up sex crimes in the clergy?
22 August 2011 at 5:49 pm
The Brits have a cogent saying: If you take the Queen’s shilling then you must do the Queen’s bidding.
If you take taxpayers’ money then you do not have the option of bowing out of rules that apply to the use of ALL taxpayers’ money.