Abusive Parents in UK "Frightened" That Gay Couple Will Raise Children

Catholic birth parents in the United Kingdom lost a court battle over plans by a gay couple to adopt two of their children, in the latest Catholic adoption controversy.

More than a year ago, the two boys in question, now ages two and four, were removed from the Slovakian birth parents’ custody due to neglect. According to Pink News, the father admitted to beating them and the young children were not adequately supervised or cared for.

Two organizations, Christian Concern and Children Belong to Parents, supported the birth parents’ challenge to the planned adoption, arguing that removing them from Catholicism and placing them with same-gender parents would cause psychological damage.

They lost their case in the UK’s High Court last week. Lucie Boddington, head of Children Belong to Parents, told The Tablet the birth parents “feel horrible” and are “frightened” that a gay couple would adopt the boys. The birth parents now plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. Responding to these claims, Sir James Munby, senior judge of the Family Court, said the adoption case was adjudicated according to standards “of reasonable men and women in contemporary English society.”

In a related note, news broke recently that St. Margaret’s Children and Family Care Society, a Catholic adoption agency in Scotland, successfully appealed a ruling which had deemed it discriminatory to withhold adoptions from same-gender couples. The Scottish Charity Appeals Panel restored the Society’s charitable standing, even as the Society’s chairman is on the record as describing gay couples’ parenting as a “terrible social experiment.”

Legalizing marriage equality in the United Kingdom and elsewhere has meant anti-LGBT activists have taken a different route, and unfortunately adoption equality is a new chosen target. In Scotland, Malta, France, and elsewhere, adoptions by same-gender couples have been flash points. In several locales in the US, Catholic Charities has stopped all adoption services rather than place children with married gay couples.

As was noted on this blog several years ago, and as many experts have indicated, it is essential when discussing adoption and LGBT people that the well-being of children be the foremost concern, and not any discriminatory agenda by the anti-gay activists. Perhaps the Catholic parents in this story’s first court case could be comforted by the fact that the judge has placed their children in what is known to be a loving and supportive home.

–Bob Shine, New Ways Ministry

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