Make room for 'bias' in adoption
WHAT IS REALLY at stake in the controversy over the decision by Catholic Charities to cease making adoption placements after so many decades and such evident success with children who are difficult to place? How should those of us who are not Catholic seek to understand this decision and the reaction it has evoked?
Typical of the reaction from critics of the decision is the pronouncement that it is immoral for Catholic Charities to abandon the needs of children to be in loving and nurturing homes.
Such a result would be deeply disturbing, though it seems unlikely. Presumably the same amount of state funds, directed through other agencies, will continue to be available to support placements; how does that result in abandoning children? Only, I suppose, if it is believed that Catholic Charities has been doing an especially effective job with meeting the needs of children who are especially vulnerable and that secular alternatives will not be as effective.
That is the crux of the issue in this instance and many others which are sure to follow. Traditionally, much of the ''human care of human beings" in this and other countries has been by organizations founded and maintained with religious motivations and often a spirit of dedication that prevents the routinization of care. Governments have usually recognized that faith-based programs have a special ability to minister to those who are most vulnerable and need individualized attention. Thus, for example, the militantly atheistic government of East Germany nevertheless entrusted much care of young children and the elderly to Protestant organizations.
The Charitable Choice provision of the 1996 welfare reform law signed by President Clinton was intended to encourage such efforts, while protecting the integrity of faith-based organizations. The purpose of Charitable Choice is to fulfill the public purpose of more effectively serving the poor and needy, not to ensure that religious groups will receive government funds. If a state chooses to use federal welfare funds to contract with any nongovernmental social-service provider, it must not discriminate against equally qualified providers just because they have a religious character. If funded, the latter have a right to retain that religious character, including in decisions about hiring.
On the other hand, those potentially served by a faith-based agency must have access to an alternative provider and are considered to have consented to the religious characteristics of the agency from which they accept service.
While federal antidiscrimination law provides an exception for faith-based organizations, states and cities may attach their own, more restrictive strings to their contracts for services. In Massachusetts, for example, once state funds flow to a nonprofit agency, the Commonwealth prohibits discrimination based on religious or sexual orientation, no matter how religiously distinctive the recipient may be. And so we come to the present standoff which Governor Romney is seeking to resolve.
It can be hard for a faith-based agency to surrender government funding once it becomes dependent upon it to serve its clients and thus carry out its mission. But sometimes it comes down to either surrendering funding or surrendering the qualities which make the agency distinctive, and perhaps contribute directly to its effectiveness.
As a longtime equity official, I agree that fair treatment of individuals is important, but all of us -- including gays and lesbians -- benefit from a healthy civil society in which there are many alternative social agencies and schools that carry out their mission on the basis of a clearly articulated understanding of what leads to human flourishing. Individuals in a free society deserve the opportunity to choose among service-providers on the basis of a match with their own convictions.
The public policy issue is not whether Catholic Charities is correct about the harmfulness of same-sex parenting; it is whether an agency with by all accounts a highly successful record of adoption placement is to be prevented by over-regulation from exercising its best judgment about which families are suitable. We have to hope that reason will prevail and that alternative viewpoints will be respected. How ironical it would be, in the name of tolerance, to suppress a respected service to the public.
Charles Glenn, professor and chairman of educational policy at Boston University, is author of ''The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-based Schools and Social Agencies." 
