A woman, a mother of five children already, and a devout Christian, living in Oregon, tried to adopt two more children. Tried, and was denied by the State.
According to Oregon’s Department of Human Services, the state’s adoption application requires that potential parents “respect, accept, and support…the sexual orientation, gender identity, [and] gender expression” of children.
The woman, already well into Oregon’s adoption process, then was required to attend explicit training to ensure she effected ODHS’ requirement. She advised them she could not attend; it violated her Christian beliefs, especially concerning the number of sexes extant in humans.
It gets worse. According to the lawsuit the woman filed last Monday,
Oregon’s Resource and Adoptive Family (RAFT) training [the woman was required to] attend[] urged potential parents to “use a child’s preferred pronouns, take a child to affirming events like Pride parades, or sign the child up for dangerous pharmaceutical interventions like puberty blockers and hormone shots.”
Assuming the lawsuit’s claim is even remotely accurate, how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?
Nor is Oregon alone. There’s the Broward County (Florida) Public Schools board. Board member Brenda Fam at a recent board meeting put some questions to her fellow board members that her constituent parents had asked her regarding the board’s proposed sex education curriculum.
They want to know what the definition of a woman is for sexual education curriculum in Broward County. They want to know what individuals can get pregnant and what individuals can give birth.
The district’s Superintendent, Earlean Smiley:
They want to know what the definition of what a woman is in the sexual education curriculum for Broward County. That question is more than a question. It is a thought process, it’s an examination, a lot of laws based on a lot of things.
I guess I’m procrastinating and hesitating because there is no clear-cut answer I can give you at this point[.]
Fellow board member Sarah Leonardi:
This curriculum, the policy, the support guide, the goal of all of us being here is to support children and to educate children. And not to engage in a political line of questioning that distracts from that mission. I just think it’s very important that we stick to the purpose of, again, the curriculum, the policy, the support guide, which is to support children and not get distracted by other agendas.
No, the questions are quite simple and straightforward, and the biology underlying the questions is just as straightforward. It isn’t “a thought process,” it isn’t an “examination;” the biology of the matter perfectly straightforward. Nor is it “other agendas;” the other agendas, “the politics,” center on this board’s efforts to blur physiology, to disguise the ideological nature of the board’s—and the Superintendent’s—intended “teachings” and to hide all of that from the parents.
Here, too, I ask: how is this not institutionalized grooming? How is this not institutionalized child sex abuse?