Washington Examiner
Wise bill would stop Biden administration gender transition rule from killing foster care
By Quin Hillyer
All credit to Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and colleagues for introducing a bill that could save foster care services and children from one of the most morally misbegotten initiatives of the entire Biden administration.
As this newspaper editorialized last December, Biden’s appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services are pushing a rule which, in the supposed cause of embracing varying sexual “identities,” could seriously exacerbate shortages in the nationwide availability of foster care. The rule also would violate religious freedom while essentially putting confused children rather than adults in charge of life-altering decisions about chemical and surgical alternations of their bodies.
Biden’s team would do all this via a rule from HHS’s Administration for Children and Families that would prevent states from using child-adoption agencies that do not cater to twisted leftist dogma about “children who are [supposedly] non-binary, or have non-confirming gender identity or expression.” The administration’s supporting documents make clear the policy has a bias in favor of chemical and surgical transitioning procedures.
Yet faith-based organizations comprise 40% of government-contracted child placement agencies, and observant Christians are three times more likely than others to consider fostering children. Because most foster care is credentialed via government regulations, this rule would eliminate most of these willing, loving agencies and families from providing homes to children in need.
The proposed rule is appalling. It is massive cruelty masquerading as progressive compassion. It assumes that a gender-confused child is better off without a nurturing, family-based home at all than he would be in a home where parents call him by the pronoun that matches his chromosomes and anatomy. As in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, the Biden rule would favor institutional settings over real family homes, which the radical Left sees as “stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman,” and their children.
Marshall’s bill, co-sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), would block this Biden edict “or any substantially similar rule.” In January, Marshall and five other senators sent a letter opposing the rule to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, but to no avail.
“This proposal would place further strain on the child welfare system and undermine the ability of states to provide safe, stable, and loving homes to our most vulnerable children,” they wrote. For just one example of the practical effects of such a rule, “In 2011, Illinois passed a law ending its partnerships with faith-based agencies. Between 2012 and 2019, Illinois lost 5,352 foster homes.”
Moreover, the rule’s bias in favor of gender “transitions” ignores growing evidence, they wrote, that “these procedures can cause irreparable harm to children, many of whom have inconsistent parental guidance and lack the physiological development that is necessary to make an informed decision of such consequence. States should not be penalized for acting to protect the children of their state.”
Indeed, a growing consensus is moving in the opposite direction from the woke, pro-gender transition dogma of the Biden rule-makers, with numerous European nations moving to restrict rather than promote transitioning practices. To quote one report last year, “longitudinal data collected and analyzed by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and England have concluded that the risk-benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable.”
The proposed Biden rule is a moral monstrosity. Congress ought to move with dispatch to block it by passing Marshall’s wise and simple bill.