Catholic Church shutters adoption agency to spite gays

The Boston archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church announced Friday it would turn its back on children who need homes rather than continue to consider gay parents as equal to straights, as Massachusetts state law demands. Once its current contract with the state expires, the church's Catholic Charities will stop providing adoption services in explicit protest of the state's refusal to allow it to discriminate against gay and lesbian potential parents, The Boston Globe reported.

Catholic Charities has provided hundreds of children with new homes during its approximately 20 years of work with the state, including a number of children placed with gay or lesbian parents.

The state's Catholic bishops, who oversee the charity, had asked for an exemption to the antidiscrimination law that demands the group treat all potential parents equally. Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a Republican widely thought to have presidential aspirations, sided with the bishops but could not himself provide the exemption, which would have required legislative approval.

The church's crusade against equality for gays and lesbians and the state's insistence on equal treatment created "a dilemma we cannot resolve," the president and the chairman of Catholic Charities' board of trustees said in a statement. The group therefore elected to resolve the dilemma at the expense of homeless children. Despite that decision, the statement insisted, "At all times we sought to place the welfare of children at the heart of our work."

"Today's decision by Boston's Catholic Charities to cease their adoption assistance program that once secured safe, caring, and loving homes for hundreds of children is a tragedy for the children they served," countered Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of Family Pride, an advocacy group for LGBT-led families. "Rather than expanding the opportunities for children in need by allowing adoption by gay and lesbian couples whom credible research in the last 25 years has proved fully capable of raising well-adjusted children, they have opted instead to deny any children access to their long-standing tradition of excellent work in this field." (Advocate.com)