A single mother of five filed a lawsuit against the Oregon Department of Human Services for denying her adoption application due to her religious beliefs. Today she is heading to court.
Jessica Bates, a single mother of five, who also lost her husband in a car crash six years prior, attempted to apply with the department to adopt children in 2022. She was turned down.
In the case, ADF attorneys represent Bates and say Oregon state officials are categorically excluding her because of her Christian beliefs. They are asking the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon to allow Jessica Bates to provide a loving home to children in need while her lawsuit continues.
Bates began the process of applying to become certified to adopt a child from foster care last year. 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 this required Bates to agree to say and do things that went against her faith.
“Oregon is abandoning children in favor of a political agenda,” said ADF Legal Counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, who will argue before the court on behalf of Bates
Widmalm-Delphonse told LifeNews: “America’s foster and adoption care system is in critical need of loving homes, and states should be doing everything they can to bring in more families willing to take in children, not fewer. Instead, Oregon imposes an ideological litmus test that brings Jessica to an impossible choice of renouncing her religious beliefs or abandoning her hope of caring for vulnerable kids. We are asking the court to put a stop to this unlawful discrimination, because the state shouldn’t put politics over children in need.”
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During her application process, Bates informed 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 agree 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.
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.
“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,” ADF Senior Counsel Jonathan Scruggs, director of the ADF Center for Conscience Initiatives, said in the press release. “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.”
The 41-page lawsuit explained that Bates hoped to adopt a “sibling pair” that are both under the age of 10 and began applying in March 2022. Bates said that during the trainings for the adoption she “realized that her faith might conflict with some of the Department’s expectations for adoptive parents.”
Bates, who lost her husband in a car collision six years ago, is a mother of five children, ages 10 to 17. Inspired by the story of a man who adopted a child from foster care, Bates felt a calling to follow the biblical teaching to care for orphans. She seeks to adopt a sibling pair, who are generally harder to place. State officials, however, rejected her application for failing to “meet the adoption home standards” and excluded her from accessing any child welfare service because she refused to abandon her religious beliefs.
