Biden’s Child Welfare Rules Will Make Foster Kids Homeless for the Holidays

As the usual repertoire of festive songs reminds us, the longing for home is strongest at Christmas time. But this year, due to a crippling shortage of foster homes and adoptive parents, thousands of children will spend the holidays not in a home, but in an office, a shelter, or even alone in a motel.

These tragedies are not confined to one locality or state. Philadelphia has held its wards in a “childcare room” where assault and human trafficking are serious concerns. The state of Illinois has held close to 100 young people in juvenile jails and psychiatric facilities, sometimes for weeks on end. West Virginia and Montana have sent hundreds of children to out-of-state sites with little to no oversight and accountability. Sadly, the list goes on and on.

Faced with these horror stories, our leaders should be racing to expand the number of foster homes and adoptive parents and to leverage non-governmental charities that care for children in need. Instead, President Joe Biden is attempting to restrict both. At least, that will be the impact of his administration’s latest child welfare regulations.

These regulations, for which public comment recently ended, require all child welfare providers to conform to left-wing sexual ideology. This isn’t about compassion for kids struggling with their identity. This is about demanding woke orthodoxy—an up-front commitment to using a child’s “identified pronouns, chosen name, and allow the child to dress in a . . . manner that the child believes reflects their self-identified gender identity and expression”—from everyone in contact with the system.

Under this regime, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish couples would have to approach fostering and adopting in fear of legal persecution. So would faith-based nonprofits. All caregivers would be made to undergo dystopian “training” to ensure that they toe the progressive line in any and all circumstances.

These regulations directly defy the Supreme Court’s ruling in Fulton v. Philadelphia, which found that pressuring religious Americans to abandon their closely held beliefs violates the First Amendment. But they also alienate the single largest source of foster families—threatening to force tens of thousands more children to sleep in hotel rooms or offices as they wait for a home. Faith-based nonprofits make up 40 percent of government-contracted child placement agencies across the country, and 65 percent of non-kin foster parents attend religious services weekly. Much, if not all, of that support will vanish if President Biden’s regulations prevail.

President Biden’s regulations reveal two truths about our culture. First, they prove that wokeness is deliberately destructive. There’s no other way to describe a system that sees detaining innocent children in juvenile prisons as morally preferable to placing them with religious foster parents. This ideology encourages its adherents to put perverse virtue signaling ahead of people’s actual welfare—even if that means hurting children who have already experienced deep trauma.

Second, President Biden’s regulations make it clear that conservatives and people of faith need to work even harder to stop wokeness from harming our nation’s children. When Dobbs v. Jackson overturned Roe v. Wade, the burden fell on conservatives to prove that we are pro-life at all of its stages, not just in the womb. An impending foster crisis reinforces the need for action, giving us the opportunity to put pro-life principles into practice.

This is why I and sixteen of my colleagues have united behind Senator Tim Scott’s (R-SC) Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act. The bill would prohibit government discrimination against faith-based child welfare providers, effectively overruling the new woke standards. Similarly, my Lifting Local Communities Act would prohibit government discrimination against faith-based charities in the allocation of grants and other types of funding.

I hope more Republicans join us in supporting this legislation. I hope Democrats join us, too. The greater our numbers, the stronger our message to the Biden Administration: this Christmas, foster children deserve a warm, loving home, not a cold night on a homeless shelter cot.

Image by IdeaBug, Inc. and licensed via Adobe Stock. Image resized.