Anybody who thinks it is possible for them to avoid the Left’s growing legal assault against American individuals and institutions that uphold traditional, Christian moral values better wake up to the reality that nobody is exempt.
The reality that the Left is the lion on the prowl looking for whom it can devour is well-illustrated in the efforts of two New York state government agencies — the Office for Children and Family Services (OCFS) and the New York Division of Human Rights (DHR) — to force a traditional Christian adoption agency in Syracuse to conform to the Woke Revolution’s agenda.
The same closed mentality is prominent in most other state governments, as well as across the federal social welfare and law enforcement bureaucracies. The targeted agency in this particular case is New Hope Family Services, which bases its placement efforts on the understanding that marriage is between one man and one woman and that every child needs a mother and a father, not two moms or two dads.
New Hope has compiled an enviable record of successfully placing children in such homes for more than 50 years, according to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Arizona-based public interest legal foundation that specializes in First Amendment litigation. More than 1,000 children have been placed by New Hope with traditional families since its founding in 1965. New Hope describes its mission as being “Christ’s hands extended to offer hope and help to people with pregnancy, parenting, adoption or post-abortion needs in the Syracuse area and throughout the State of New York.”
That means New Hope, in addition to adoption services, also functions as a pregnancy resource center, a temporary foster placement agency, and a family counseling source. New Hope has never accepted one penny of funding from the state of New York and relies entirely on contributions from individuals, churches, and private foundation grants.
“New Hope devotes its efforts exclusively to placing infants and very young children for adoption. It has an extraordinary record of being willing to place — and successfully finding adoptive parents willing to accept — children who are categorized as ‘hard to place’ due to disability, medical condition, race, or other factors,” according to ADF.
“In recent decades, the vast majority of infants placed by New Hope have fallen into one or more ‘hard to place’ categories, yet New Hope has never failed to find a permanent adoptive home for any child entrusted to its care, even infants with severe medical conditions.”
If such actions are not a priceless gift to children in crisis and to American society as a whole, I don’t know what is. But what it is to the Left is unacceptable and something against which the full force of the state must be brought to bear to enforce conformity with the Woke agenda.
New Hope reached out to ADF after being informed by OCFS officials that they judged the agency’s adoption policies to be “discriminatory and impermissible.” Failure to comply by placing vulnerable children with non-traditional couples would result in the agency being closed, no matter that closure would deprive countless kids of the opportunity to be loved and raised by devoted moms and dads.
New Hope was also targeted by DHR after an individual inquired about the agency’s procedures and policies, then filed a detailed, multi-page complaint despite never having used the adoption services offered. In other words, the individual’s inquiry was not made in good faith; it was part and parcel of a lawfare-type campaign targeting New Hope for costly litigation.
“As multiple federal court decisions have found, government officials have no business forcing faith-based providers to choose between contradicting their religious convictions and closing their doors,” ADF Senior Counsel Roger Brooks said.
“What is happening to New Hope Family Services is part of a disturbing trend from Alaska and Washington to Colorado and New York: Activists are weaponizing the legal system to ruin those who simply disagree with them. We have filed this lawsuit to put a stop to state officials’ illegal and indefensible harassment of New Hope, which only wishes to continue serving New York families as it has for more than 50 years.”
As it happens, New Hope has won two significant victories, including having the court order the state agencies to pay the adoption service $25,000 in one settlement and $250,000 in the other. These are the latest wins in a long string of such victories compiled by ADF, including 14 Supreme Court cases.
But don’t expect the Left in New York or elsewhere in the U.S. to back off of efforts like those mounted against New Hope. For the Left, the court system doesn’t exist to establish justice, but rather to provide a tool for advancing an ideological agenda and thereby forcing all Americans, ultimately, to comply.
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Classical liberalism defended the right of every individual to think as he or she decides and to be free to express their views without fear of punishment by the government or other private citizens. The Left hates classical liberalism, just as it hates traditional American conservatism.
For the Left, the only thing that matters is getting to a political and judicial environment in which every American must choose between complying or suffering the consequences, however terrible those consequences may ultimately be.
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