Last year, the Log Cabin Republicans, which calls itself the “nation’s original and largest organization representing LGBT conservatives,” threw its support behind Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential election after declining to back him in 2016. And that’s kind of startling since Trump failed to keep his campaign promise that he would be an LGBTQ ally. One would think after Trump named a bigoted man like Mike Pence as his Vice President, then all bets would be off for the gay community.
And now a new law brief with the Supreme Court has been filed by the Trump Administration that argues that adoption agencies should have a right to refuse to home children with same-sex couples based on religious beliefs, Queerty reports. That’s not very pro-life of Trump, is it? The city has 400,000 children in foster care.
The Trump administration argues in the brief, according to Metro Weekly, that that the city of Philadelphia’s decision to terminate a contract with Catholic Social Services because of the agency’s refusal to place foster care children with same-sex couples violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
The City of Philadelphia had a contract with Catholic Social Services to help place needy children in foster and adoptive care. However, Philadelphia terminated its contract with CSS in 2018 when the agency refused to place any of its children with same-sex couples, citing a city law that requires nondiscrimination by all agencies contracting with the city government, according to Queerty. CSS claimed it would not abide by the regulation and cited religious exemption.
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CSS sued Philadelphia in 2018, claiming religious discrimination, and in the end, a federal judge sided with the city, noting that other religious agencies contracting with the city also objected to homosexuality, but those agencies did not refuse service to same-sex couples. That went to a court of appeals where it was unanimously upheld in 2019.
And now, the Trump administration wants to fight that all the way to the Supreme Court.
“The Trump administration submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on the side of a taxpayer-funded agency that is seeking a constitutional right to turn away people who fail to meet the agency’s religious criteria,” Leslie Cooper, the deputy director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, said in a statement. “While this case involves rejecting LGBTQ families, if the Court accepts the claims made in this case, not only will this hurt children in foster care by reducing the number of families to care for them, but anyone who depends on a wide range of government services will be at risk of discrimination based on their sexual orientation, religion, or any other characteristic that fails a provider’s religious litmus test.
Hmm… I wonder if this could have anything to do with Trump’s favorability among white Catholics that has plunged by thirty-two points in just two months’ time. There’s always a reason behind what Trump does, and it’s always something that just benefits him.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
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