CV NEWS FEED // Six Republican senators penned a Thursday letter to the Biden Health and Human Services Department against a proposed rule that seeks to force potential foster parents to comply with the LGBTQ movement.
“We write to express our profound concerns regarding the notice of proposed rulemaking … which would impose new mandates on states that would narrow the pool of eligible foster families for children,” wrote Sen. Roger Marshall, R-KS, and five of his Republican colleagues in the letter addressed to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra:
The premise of this proposal is that any foster care provider who does not “affirm” a child’s sexual orientation or gender that differs from his or her biological sex is perpetuating and committing child abuse and will be shunned for failing to support the foster child’s “health and Wellbeing.”
“If enacted, this proposal would place further strain on the child welfare system and undermine the ability of states to provide safe, stable, and loving homes to our most vulnerable children,” the letter stressed.
The Republican lawmakers also highlighted that the rule would “force states to adopt extreme gender ideology in their placement decisions.”
“Congress intentionally gave states the authority to make those determinations, but HHS has usurped that authority to impose its own woke ideology in place of states’ judgments,” the lawmakers wrote.
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The senators also pointed out that the proposed rule would infringe on the religious freedom of many potential foster parents who don’t accept aspects of LGBTQ ideology for faith reasons:
The Department’s proposal would put religious families and religious providers in the position of declaring themselves unfit placements for a subset of the foster care pool, in spite of their long track records of excellence in serving and loving all children who need help.
The senators cited data illustrating “that when faith-based providers are excluded, there are fewer good homes.”
“For example, Boston stopped partnering with faith-based providers in 2006,” the senators indicated. “One year later, the percentage of children who aged out of the Massachusetts foster care system rose by over 50% and has not returned to pre-2006 levels.”
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“Every child deserves to thrive in a safe, loving, and stable family,” the letter concluded. “For the reasons stated above, we urge the immediate rescission of the proposed rule.”
Joining Marshall in signing the letter were Sens. John Barrasso, R-WY, Tom Cotton, R-AR, Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-MS, Mike Lee, R-UT, and Markwayne Mullin, R-OK.
The United States Administration for Children and Families (ACF) proposed the rule in question on September 28, 2023. ACF is a division of HHS.
As CatholicVote reported in November:
The first requirement [of the proposed rule] stipulates that a foster family must “establish an environment free of hostility, mistreatment, or abuse based on the child’s LGBTQI+ status.” Under the umbrella of “hostility,” “mistreatment” and “abuse,” ACF includes “unreasonably limit[ing] or deny[ing] a child’s ability to express their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression,” as well as any attempt to change a child’s “sexual orientation.” …
Secondly, foster families for LGBTQ-identifying children must be trained “to be prepared with the appropriate knowledge and skills to provide for the needs of the child related to the child’s self-identified sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”
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“This is not just an attack on Christians, but on the children themselves,” CatholicVote Director of Governmental Affairs Tom McClusky wrote of the pending rule. “The foster care system depends on individuals and organizations of faith,” and “in some states, for example New Mexico, every private placement agency is Christian.”
Marshall told The Daily Wire shortly after the letter’s release: “Unfortunately, under the Biden Administration, moral and religious values are under attack by the far Left’s endless pursuit to further their LGBTQ+ agenda.”
“We are fighting back against the Biden Administration’s woke gender ideology and pronoun politics,” the senator added. “Their new proposed rule aims to exclude faith-based foster care providers from helping children in need — not on my watch.”
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This is not the first time Marshall has launched an effort to stop a proposed Biden administration rule that sought to push the LGBTQ movement.
In September, he introduced an ultimately unsuccessful resolution that would have ended the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) proposed rule of withholding student lunch funding for schools that did not adopt pro-“trans” policies.
