SALEM, Oregon (PNN) - April 5, 2023 - The state of Oregon is denying the application of a woman who wants to adopt because she is a Christian and will not agree to support gender transition if the child she adopts ends up being transgender.

This is where the Left has planned to take this argument from the start. It’s a backdoor way to openly discriminate against people of faith.

They don’t care about the welfare of children; they care about spreading their ideology.

On behalf of a single mother of five wishing to adopt siblings from foster care, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Oregon state officials for denying her application because of her religious beliefs.

Jessica Bates began the process of applying to become certified to adopt a child from Oregon’s foster care system one year ago. The Oregon Department of Human Services, the agency responsible for the delivery and administration of the state’s child welfare programs, denied her application because individuals seeking to adopt must agree to “respect, accept, and support … the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of any child the department could place in an applicant’s home, and Bates could not agree to this because of her faith.

“Oregon’s policy amounts to an ideological litmus test: people who hold secular or ‘progressive’ views on sexual orientation and gender identity are eligible to participate in child welfare programs, while people of faith with religiously informed views are disqualified because they don’t agree with the State’s orthodoxy,” said ADF Senior Counsel Jonathan Scruggs, director of the ADF Center for Conscience Initiatives. “The government can’t exclude certain communities of faith from foster care and adoption services because the State doesn’t like their particular religious beliefs.”

During her application process, Bates alerted ODHS that she will happily love and accept any child, but she cannot say or do something that goes against her Christian faith. ODHS’s policy, however, excludes her and others who hold traditional religious beliefs about human nature and sexuality by requiring parents to use a child’s preferred pronouns, take a child to affirming events like Pride parades, or facilitate a child’s access to dangerous pharmaceutical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone shots if the child so requests. As such, ODHS’s policy penalizes Bates for her religious views, compels her to speak words that violate her beliefs, and deprives her of equal protection of the law because of her faith.

Do you think the state of Oregon would object to this woman’s application if she was a drug addicted member of Antifa? Of course not.