Sunday, March 6, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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Elizabeth and Gabriel Rutan-Ram of Knoxville, Tenn., were recently rejected as adoptive parents for a reason that is simply unacceptable in the United States of America.
The couple were turned away because they’re Jewish.
No other justification was given — in fact, the adoption organization that handled the Rutan-Rams’ request to adopt a disabled boy living in Florida fully acknowledged they would be fit as parents. But the organization, the state-funded Holston United Methodist Home for Children, rejected the couple under the belief that “faith is such an integral part of family life that it is better for families to be served by organizations with whom they share more compatible belief systems.”
In other words, only Christians need apply. And in defense of its actions, Holston could point to a law passed by Tennessee’s Republican-majority legislature in 2020 allowing adoption agencies to decline to work with couples based on “religious or moral convictions or policies.”
This story isn’t over — the Rutan-Rams have filed a lawsuit over the issue — but the situation serves as a cautionary tale about what can happen when faith is allowed to enter public policy. When a particular faith gains control, members of other faiths can and generally do lose freedoms and equality.
In this instance, any American Jew, American Muslim, American atheist or any other non-Christian American who contributes to today’s GOP should take note that they are funding a slide toward a theocracy that has no room for them.
In the case of the Rutan-Rams, Holston referred them to a private agency that possibly could have facilitated their adoption of the Florida boy, which involved special certification. But that process was prohibitively expensive for the couple, who instead opted to foster children in Tennessee and are now in the process of adopting a 14-year-old girl.
But the Rutan-Rams, who are 30 and have been married for five years, argue in their lawsuit that Tennessee’s funding of Holston and any other organization that discriminates based on spirituality violates the religious-freedom and equal-protection guarantees of the state constitution. Several other plaintiffs have signed onto the suit, including a Christian minister and Unitarian Universalist minister.
Lawsuit aside, we must note the cost to the child involved. He has no lawyer, he had no parents and he was denied a family that wanted to love him by adults more worried about religious/political posturing than they were about the child.
It’s commendable that the couple is taking legal action and that others have joined the cause, but the group may face a rocky road ahead. Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled in a similar case that the city of Philadelphia had to continue contracting with a Catholic agency that refused to serve LGBTQ couples. In that ruling, the court declared that faith-based agencies are not covered by public accommodation law, which imposes anti-discrimination rules on public organizations and public spaces.
However, that ruling was narrowly focused, so much so that even the court’s liberal justices joined in the unanimous ruling. It doesn’t preclude success for the lawsuit in Tennessee, or suits that have been filed in several states where GOP-majority lawmakers have enacted similar laws sanctioning religious-based discrimination.
The courts should strike down these legalized-discrimination laws by recognizing them for what they are — a violation of the bedrock American principle of separation of church and state.
That principle traces back to the first European settlers to arrive in our nation, where they sought freedom to worship in the manner of their choice, independent from government-sanctioned churches. In England during the 1600s, for instance, it was illegal for Catholics and followers of other so-called noncomformist denominations — meaning any but the Church of England — to practice their own religion.
The need to end such persecution and protect religious freedoms compelled America’s founders to establish the boundary between church and state, based on the unassailable logic that citizens should not be forced to support churches or faiths in which they didn’t believe and should not be controlled by the doctrines of a given faith.
Centuries later, the need to maintain a rigid barrier is as important as ever. It’s why organizations such as Americans United for Separation of Church and State are backing the Rutan-Rams’ lawsuit.
“Too many Americans take religious freedom for granted and assume that church-state separation is something that we established in the 1700s and we don’t need to worry about,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO Americans United, in a story published by UPI. “But today, the alarm bells should be ringing because so many states and even the federal government under the Trump administration have massively undermined what we all take to be a given. And one day, if we’re not careful, we’re going to wake up and America won’t look like America anymore.”
We can’t let that happen. For the U.S. to be a truly free country, we must oppose discriminatory policies based on religion, and vote against politicians who promote those actions. Today, it’s a Jewish couple from Tennessee being denied an adoption based solely on religious grounds. Tomorrow, it could be any non-Christian facing some other form of discrimination.
