A pro-family, pro-child coalition urged the Trump administration this week to issue an executive order protecting parental rights and the religious freedom of Christian parents and foster parents.
The proposed order, which the coalition workshopped with the White House Domestic Policy Council on Wednesday, would:
- Explicitly affirm parents’ constitutional right to raise their children according to their religious beliefs.
- Repeal federal foster care rules preventing or obstructing people who affirm biological sex from becoming foster parents.
- Prohibit organizations from using federal funds to remove children from parents who do not affirm same-sex attraction or sexual identity confusion.
- Remove federal funding from organizations which help children conceal sexual identity confusion from their parents.
These four recommendations would prevent federal and state governments from unconstitutionally withholding adoption and foster care licenses from Christians or taking children with sexual identity confusion away from loving, Christian parents.
States like Colorado, Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Washington and California require prospective foster parents to affirm a child’s same-sex attraction and sexual identity confusion.
In 2024, the Department of Health and Human Services released regulations giving progressive, “gender affirming” foster care placement organizations privileged status over biology-affirming ones.
Policies like these prevent people like Jessica Bates, Bryan and Rebecca Gantt, Brian and Katy Wuoti and Mike and Kitty Burkes from fostering or adopting some of the estimated 400,000 children in the U.S. foster care system.
Parents in many states can also lose custody of their children for failure to affirm their same-sex attraction or sexual identity confusion.
The Indiana Department of Child Services took custody of Mary and Jeremy Cox’s 16-year-old son after the couple refused to affirm his “transgender identity.” A court eventually found the Cox’s had not abused their son — but the state never gave him back.
He remained in the department’s care to receive treatment for an eating disorder which had worsened while he was away from home.
The Coxes are just one of innumerable heartbreaking examples of state agencies taking children from loving parents who affirm biological. Erin Friday, one of the coalition leaders who met with the White House on Wednesday, says the number of families in this situation far exceeds most people’s expectations.
“The public is unaware that children are being kidnapped by child protective services and family judges because these cases are usually sealed or there are confidentiality laws that prevent parents from going public,” she told The Daily Signal.
Christian parents need not have their child taken to suffer under child protective agencies’ scrutiny.
Erin Lee received an unexpected visit from the Colorado Department of Human Services after she tried to hold her daughter’s public school accountable for secretly teaching gender ideology.
“We managed to evade losing our children that day, but I’ve met many parents who weren’t so lucky,” Lee, who eventually saved her daughter from damaging sexual identity confusion, told the Daily Wire.
She continued: “I also had a six-year-old and an infant at the time and I shudder to think that I could have lost all three of my kids for being a good parent, for being unwilling to lie to my daughter and send her down a path of self-hatred and destruction.”
Laws and policies penalizing Christian parents and prospective foster parents for questioning “gender affirming care” are increasingly ludicrous given the mounting evidence proving sex-rejecting procedures harm minors.
The Department of Health and Human Services’ own, peer-reviewed report found “transgender” medical interventions — including puberty blockers, wrong-sex hormones and surgeries — pose “significant, long term and too often ignored” harms to children.
It’s about time America’s foster care systems reflect reality.
Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.
