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I ran into this from another site. Please discuss this topic. Here is a portion of the of this topic:
Here is the URL for the rest of this story:
dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/a … ge_id=1770
I think this is more of a social question than it is a religion question. Personally, I think it is absurd. While I certainly don’t agree with the parents in their views, I think they are much more sinned against than sinning especially since the children are thrown back into the foster system . . . for what? Pretty absurd if you ask me.
It happens the other way around, too.
So kids are to be denied safe protective homes due to beliefs? Our foster care system needs some major reworking. These poor kids go through enough crap. Friends of ours are adopting their foster daughter, Do you know that here in Miss. The foster fathers are not allowed to be left alone with their foster daughters. He works out of their home the little girl is 4 yrs old and has to go to daycare because of this rule. Foster fathers are not allowed to care for the girl. Example: If the girl gets dirty and needs to get cleaned up she has to wait until the mother can help her. I know they are trying to be protective but, geez. There are other rules that are there to protect that make foster parenting hard., really I can understand why there is a shortage of good parents. Confusing rules, rules that are hard to follow… Its a mess. And each state is different.
I am withholding any comment on this topic due to the fact most people here knows about my faith. My preference lies in hearing how others feel about this.
I think these regulations come about for two reasons. One is that the general population doesn’t much care about foster kids. The other is that the general population doesn’t realise what most of these kids need, which is a warm, dry place to sleep, someone to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for them once in a while, and to not be molested, neglected or physically abused. Maybe some prodding to go to school.
I sure have no problem with people raising kids to be Christians. Especially if the alternative is “raising” them to be drug-addicted adolescent career criminals. Would I rather that the greatest poisons of fundamental Christianity were kept from them? Yup. But there are far greater dangers, dangers that many of them were exposed to before entering the system. Which is why they are in the system.
Agreed.
Although, I think that if the religious and the atheist alike have a set of morals that leads them to foster children, those same morals should dictate that they lie under the circumstances (if possible) so that they may continue doing their work.
Most heinous in any of these cases is the fact that for the most part it appears that some lawyers got together and decided that making a point was more important than providing a child with a secure enviroment. Anyone with a modicum of common sense will see this point the way Faust put it. What in the hell is wrong with people that they would put a political agenda ahead of the common sense welfare of a child.
Liten, this is more about safe homes for kids and idiots that put faith and politics before the kid’s actual mental and physical welfare. Its not about faith in particular. they complain about lack of good foster families then they pull these stunts. They system needs reworking. Religion /antireligion and politics need to stay out.
Kris, since you personally addressed me about this issue, for the record I agree with Eunice and Owen. I won’t compromise my beliefs because the system decided to change the acceptance policies for potential foster parents. So you can include me in your ‘idiot’ analogy. If I were going to be a foster parent and those rules weren’t inhibitive to my doing so, I would gladly accept any child regardless of ethnicity, age, gender, sexual leanings, etc. I would do so out of love, but I will not alter my faith/beliefs because the state mandates it through their qualifications.
I don’t think there was any requirement about changing belief, just to quiet down already with the gay-people-are-sinners-going-to-hell business.
I dunno, I don’t think I’d approve up front a foster parent application that indicated bigotry. What if they were instead outspoken racists? Is it okay for the children to be there in that case? Maybe the social service agencies oughta ask such questions before they place kids. I certainly wouldn’t place a kid with gender identity issues in a home where they’d face parents with such beliefs about homosexuality.
With that said, the foster system is generally pretty desperate to get responsible parents, so it would be nice if they could actually pick and choose in a way that’s really best for the kids in all ways. But it doesn’t work that way. So if I were the social worker in this situation, I’d admonish the parents, ask them to cease proseltyzing on that subject with the foster kids, and then move along to the cases where kids are being starved or raped by their foster parents. Or their biological parents, for that matter.
Ingenium - I think you and I basically agree here, but I think I would allow racist foster parents. I’m not sure we should be looking for ideal parents, just better ones than the kids had to begin with. A lot of people are racist. A lot of people live entirely unenlightened lives. But many of these kids come from places where they are in so much danger - physical, mental and emotional danger, that we might not want to wait for foster parents who pass every test you and I might devise.
It’s a tough one. My parents weren’t racist. My father, as the head of the music department for a small city’s school system, hired the first, and I think still the only gay black man to teach there. More than one escapee from the mental health center across the street was welcomed into our home to await an escort back to the overnight holding unit at that clinic (this was done by the police, because these people were always assumed to be potentially violent - they never were). As a child, my father would bring me across the street to the African Methodist Episcopal church to hear their periodic gospel sings. The best man at my parents’ wedding was gay. I was lucky. I grew up in a place where there were many immigrants, where many of my friends were on welfare, lived in projects, were from all different backgrounds. Mom’s tennis partner and longtime best friend was a lesbian.
I wasn’t raised to be a bigot. I don’t advocate it, either. But there are worse things to be as a parent. There was a lot of heroin in my city - it’s right down the road from New Bedford, Mass, which was, during the '70’s, a major port of entry for heroin. Lots of it. Gangs, which still exist (different gangs, now). Lots of squalor, teenage pregnancy, drug addiction, violent crime. High droput rate. Fall River, where I grew up, was always a place where Boston shipped people to live in the projects - not usually model tenants. We always had many more units than we needed for the indigenous population. There are many places like this. The Catholic Church runs a large “orphanage” in Fall River - all foster kids who have no other place to go. Yeah, they have to go to church.
These kids have nothing - less than nothing. A bigot that won’t beat them or “sell” them for drugs doesn’t seem too great an evil to me.
I don’t see that you should alter your beliefs. I am saying the system needs to alter their ways. Faust says it well enough for me as does Ingenium. the people that wish to open their loving homes cannot be anything other than what they are. The Gov’t has to understand that placing a child in a stable loving environment even if it is not PC or it is bigoted is still far better than having this child in a dangerous environment. We wanted to be foster parents but, when I found out that they automatically remove kids from your care after 6 months, I said no. I had to. I could not open my heart and home to a child only to have that child yanked away after bonding with him or her. It hurts the child and it hurts the true loving parent. if the kid is happy stable and healthy why move them? That part makes no sense to me. They are not thinking about what the child needs emotionally.
I would perhaps understand if they were radically religious to the point of being a cult…or if they were ascetics Christians or something…but I see no problem with raising a child in a Christian home.
I believe your assessment is 100% correct.
I am a cynic and I think I “understand” why the foster children system does that: it gives the civil servants work.
I genuinely believe that the motivation behind the deliberate shuffling of foster children from one home to an other is to secure the jobs of the bureaucrats who oversee the foster children. Those bureaucrats are evil and dangerous.
I don’t believe this to be true, although I think that the bureaucracy itself can function pretty inefficiently and thus appear that way. Or social workers get overloaded or have limited options for placing kids. And don’t forget that when kids are placed into foster care, there’s a simultaneous procedure going on in the court regarding the birth parent’s parental rights. When the kids are taken from the home, the parent has to undergo an assessment and is given a plan that s/he must fulfill before getting the kids back. From what I’ve seen, this is seldom a smooth or direct path, often there are substance abuse issues, serious behavioral issues, all sorts of problems that have to be addressed. In my state (CA) a judge reviews the parent’s progress every six months and may determine at any of these reviews whether to give more time or to go ahead and terminate the parental rights. There’s supposed to be a maximum of 18 months allowed for the parent to get everything done but, as with most court procedures, it can take longer before there’s a resolution. Birth parents learn how to manipulate the system to create delays. Or if the social services agency doesn’t dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’, it can also mean a legal delay. The emphasis is on ‘family reunification’, which does occur more often than not. But still, there are a lot of kids that end up in limbo for too long a time. And the longer they stay in the system, the more likely it will be that they have to change foster homes.
Here there’s no 6-month rule. If the foster situation is working out for everyone (and this usually includes the foster parent’s ability to assure the child is available for regular visitation with the birth parent), then the kids stay there unless and until something occurs with their case. For kids whose birth parents’ legal rights are terminated, but no adoptive home becomes available over time, there’s also “long term foster care”, which means that they can stay in a particular foster home until they’re of legal age. But that’s still never a rock-solid guarantee, because the foster family’s situation is always subject to change so that they may not be able to provide a home.
Inge,
I do not doubt that the excessive bureaucracy creates the same effect.
However, as pointed out by yourself and others, some jurisdiction deliberately have an automatic 6-month shuffle rule. That is enough for me to categorically dismiss any honorable intentions of the bureaucrats in those jurisdictions. I will not give them the benefit of any doubt.