Iconoclasm: Catholic adoption in the UK and Massachusetts

Tony Blair gave Catholic adoption agencies all over the UK a twenty month grace period to provide fully nondiscriminatory adoptions to same sex couples, the Guardian  reported today.  Catholic adoption agencies have twenty months to implement procedures that allow adoptions by same-sex couples, or to shut their doors.

 
 

All parties involved expressed hope that the good work of these traditional Catholic charities would not be lost to the children of the UK.

 

Last year in the US, the commonwealth of Massachusetts went through a similar process and then Governor Mitt Romney -- now out of office and contemplating a run for the Republican nomination for president -- exempted several Catholic adoption agencies from a state law forbidding discrimination against gay and lesbian couples seeking adoptees.

 

The Boston Globe article reports: 

Catherine Loeffler, executive director of Catholic Charities of Worcester, said she does not see her agency as doing anything harmful to gays or lesbians, because her agency simply refers these applicants to other agencies. She said her organization wants to help children, while keeping its work ''in harmony with Catholic teachings."

Ms. Loeffler's attitude reminds one of the separate-but-equal rulings that supported Jim Crow in the southern United States in the days before civil rights had a legal position with teeth. 

 

Her attitude that services provided to the public by a charity given tax-exempt status -- which is not a church -- should be allowed to refer people off to other groups despite Massachusetts' law specifically forbidding discrimination in adoption -- smacks of the worst kind of blindness to prejudice. 

 

Romney's decision to exempt a faith-based charity serving the public from state law in this case seems to be another example of the man's grandstanding for a conservative base to support his bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency.

 

Should faith-based charities that serve constituents of all faiths (in this case prospective adoptees) and clients of all faiths (in this case, the prospective adoptive parents) be allowed exemption from  laws in the US, when the UK can come to a reasonable peace with the issue?

 

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Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:

Shava’s column, Iconoclasm, published several times a week to Gather Essentials: Newsis an examination of the provocative ideas emerging in media and world culture behind the news.

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