Of faith and foster parenting
How should we interpret what happened to the Rutan-Ram family when they were denied foster parent training because they are Jewish?
In January, I caught wind of a case working its way through the Tennessee judicial system. Immediately, I was unsure how to feel about the facts and analysis of the commentators who were discussing the events on a podcast. Last week, that case was dismissed pending appeal in Tennessee, so it feels as though this may be the moment to talk about it.
My current fixation case, and the subject of this week, is Rutan-Ram v Tennessee Department of Children’s Services. The Rutan-Rams are a couple from Tennessee who, after learning they were unable to have biological children, decided to begin the process of becoming foster parents to adopt a special needs child from Florida. As part of the process, the couple was required to complete a mandatory training and home-study certification program. The Rutan-Rams were referred to Holston United Methodist Home for Children (“Holston”), an agency funded in part by the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, to fill in the gaps in access to foster parent training in the Knoxville area. The Rutan-Rams were initially told they would be eligible to receive training from Holston. However, on the day they were set to begin training, they received an email informing them that they would not be allowed to complete the program.
Why the change? Holston only provides their services to families who share their Christian belief system and intend to teach children about Jesus. The Rutan-Rams are Jewish. Holston referred the Rutan-Rams to a private agency which did not provide training to families looking to adopt children from the foster care system, as an alternative. With no other child-placing agencies providing the necessary training for out-of-state fostering and adoption in Knoxville, their plans to adopt the child from Florida fell through. While the Rutan-Rams were eventually able to begin the process of fostering to adopt a teenage girl in Tennessee, the sting of their experience with Holston is difficult to overlook.
My initial reaction upon hearing about the Rutan-Rams’ struggle, was that it reeked of Antisemitism, and that this had to be illegal. On further examination, neither of those things is exactly true. Holston’s refusal to provide services to the Rutan-Rams based on the fact that they are Jewish is allowed under House Bill 836, which was passed in January 2020 and “authorizes child-placing agencies to deny child-placement services, based on the agencies’ religious policies, even if state dollars fund the services”. While this law authorizes what smells like Antisemitism in this case, it is not specifically Antisemitic because it allows agencies like Holston to discriminate against prospective foster and adoptive families of any faith or potentially sexual orientation that they feel is not aligned with their Christian values. Basically, it’s not just the Jews; it’s much bigger. This law is not unique to Tennessee as similar provisions exist in some 10 states, one of which was upheld by the Supreme Court in Fulton v Philadelphia in 2018, when they ruled that the City of Philadelphia could not refuse to fund a Catholic child-placing agency because they would not to provide certification training to LGBTQ+ couples for faith-based reasons. The Rutan-Ram lawsuit was dismissed, pending appeal, for lack of standing - meaning they failed to establish a sufficient connection to, and harm from, the law at issue for the court to hear their case.
Like almost every issue at the intersection of legal and social, there are countless things to unpack about the Rutan-Rams’ experience, more than can be touched on here.
Faith-based agencies have a long history at the centre of child-placing and adoption services. Purpose-built Jewish homes for children in the United States date back to 1623, and the first private orphanage in the United States was run by Ursuline nuns and opened in 1729. An important thing to consider about these faith-based orphanages and children’s homes, however, is that they were privately funded. Religious and community organizations provided the donations necessary to keep them running. Holston is funded, at least in part, by tax dollars.
Organizations and individuals have also long been protected in a range of efforts aimed at furthering their religious objectives. And that’s a good thing. We want families and groups to be able to practice their religion freely so long as they are not causing harm to others in the process, and to be able to share that faith with future generations. On the surface, it makes sense that this protection should extend to faith-based child-placing services. But the logic of this extension is only surface deep.
It is one thing to say that other options are available when an entity is entirely private and when there truly are other options available. An uncomfortable example of this would be the highly reported Supreme Court case involving the Colorado bakery that refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding. While many may disagree with the decision of the bakery not to provide services to that couple, and the Supreme Court’s support of that decision, they were a private business and there were other options available to that couple that were of equivalent value. That doesn't make it fair or necessarily right, but it is a consideration. Situations where the other options are not equivalent should likely be weighted differently. In the case of the Rutan-Rams, saying that there are other options was both inaccurate and reductive. The other options that they could reasonably access were not equivalent. Either they only serviced families seeking to adopt privately rather than through the foster care system or they did not provide certification for out-of-state fostering and adoptions. The lack of equivalent options is compounded by the use of tax dollars to fund Holston. This means that everyone in Tennessee is paying for a service that only a select group of people are entitled to use, and where this limitation on access would likely not exist if a secular organization were the one receiving funding.
Both the dismissal of the Rutan-Rams’ lawsuit and the Fulton case raise the argument that foster homes are not like hotels. Foster and adoptive families play a key role in the development of the children they encounter. This is absolutely true. However, using this argument to validate excluding families from fostering and adopting children because they are of a different faith than the child-placing service, makes an uncomfortable value judgment. Undergirding the refusal of Holston to provide access to training for families who do not share their Christian values is an implicit statement about the values of other faiths and the ability of families of these faiths to raise kind, giving, well-rounded children. While it is entirely reasonable for a Christian organization to believe that children are best served to learn about Jesus, just as a Jewish organization may feel it is best for children to grow up in a Kosher home, these are not the only ways of ensuring the best interests of the child. Instead, it is deciding that it is so important for a child to be raised with a particular faith that it would be better not to place them in a loving home.
There are no easy answers to the Rutan-Ram situation. Holston is entitled to promote their religious objectives. According to Tennessee law, they are entitled to receive tax dollars in order to do this, even when it means denying services to couples on the basis that they are of a different faith. While I do not have any of the answers to how this case should have been dealt with or predictions of how it will be handled on appeal, it’s hard to believe that dismissing discrimination, even state-sanctioned discrimination, on the basis that they could just go somewhere else, is correct, even more so in a country where the number of foster families needed is only going to increase.