This week while the nation watched as President Donald Trump rolled back President Obama’s protections for transgender students, discrimination against the LGBT community was even more active in Alabama. On Wednesday, the Senate Health Committee passed a bill that would allow faith-based adoption agencies to refuse to let gay couples adopt a child. This includes religious organizations who care for state foster children.
This bill should not be allowed to become law. First, it allows for discrimination against people based on their sexual orientation. There are plenty of legal precedents to show that this is not acceptable. For instance, a judge ruled in a Colorado case that a bakery could not refuse to sell a cake to a gay couple for their wedding. Sexual orientation should be protected in the same way that gender, race or disability is. Even outside of the moral wrong of discrimination, this law is impractical. It would likely be struck down in court, while costing the state a lot of money in legal fees in the process.
The bill also takes the now apparently accepted, but, in my opinion, erroneous assumption that a company, in this case an adoption agency, is a person and can hold religious beliefs that must be protected. For a more eloquent legal explanation of why this doesn’t make sense, I highly recommend Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in the Hobby Lobby case. In simpler terms, the idea of a company being a person does not make logical sense. The lack of a distinction between companies and people also led to the Citizens United decision, which made our campaign finance system a mess. Justice Ginsburg most deftly summed up the danger here when she wrote “the court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.” This adoption bill feels a lot like a mine.
Even if a company is a person and even if it were somehow morally acceptable to discriminate against people for who they love, this bill is a heartless move from the Alabama State Senate. It will literally deny homes to children. A gay couple can come and offer a safe, loving home to a child in need, and the state would rather that child go from foster family to foster family than acknowledge that gay people could be good parents. The state has a responsibility to make sure foster children end up in safe homes. But even from the most homophobic point of view, how is a home with two gay parents unsafe? Will gay sex blow up the house? I really, sincerely doubt it. The state here is putting children at a real risk. They’re taking away the potential of a better future because they would like to protect the discriminatory religious beliefs of a company, which is not a person, so it can’t have religious beliefs.
The Senate should vote no on this bill. The house should vote no on their version of the bill. If, god forbid, both halves of the legislature vote yes on a version of this bill, Governor Bentley should veto the bill. I can only hope that somewhere in the depths of the state government, there is someone that cares about children and about the rights of the LGBT community. If all else fails, I hope the ACLU gets together a lawsuit against this quickly and finds a judge to strike down a law that so clearly violates the freedoms protected by our constitution.
Allison Mollenkamp is a junior majoring in English and theatre. Her column runs biweekly.
