Christian mom wins case against state to adopt without affirming LGBT ideology

An Oregon mother is once again free to adopt children in need now that a settlement has been finalised in her fight for the right not to affirm LGBT ideology.

As covered last year by LifeSiteNews, Jessica Bates is a “devout Christian and widowed mother of five” who sought to adopt but objected to the Oregon Department of Human Services’s requirement that adoptive parents “affirm” children’s “gender identity” and was disqualified for refusing to use opposite-sex pronouns, take children to “pride” parades or give them puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

Bates sued in 2023 on First Amendment grounds, and last year a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled she was likely to succeed and therefore could resume the adoption process while the case worked its way through the system. The panel found at the time that the state’s requirements “quite clearly restrict and compel speech based on both content and viewpoint,” violating the principle that government “may not insist upon our adherence to state favoured orthodoxies, whether of a religious or political variety.”

On Monday, Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) announced that the state agreed to a settlement barring it from using its woke rules to deny Bates’ application over her beliefs, freeing her to adopt. It also entitles her to the costs and attorneys’ fees.

“Every child deserves a loving home, and children suffer when the government excludes people of faith from foster care because of the state’s own ideological crusade,” ADF senior counsel Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse responded. “Oregon officials turned Jessica away just because of her common-sense belief that parents should help children become comfortable with who they are instead of pushing them down a path of confusion and medicalisation. We believe this settlement is a win-win that protects constitutional rights and puts children’s interests first.”

“As a widowed mom of five, I was surprised to feel God nudging me to adopt. I never dreamt it would lead to a years-long lawsuit when Oregon excluded me just because of my religious convictions about gender,” Bates herself said. “I am grateful for ADF picking up my case, advocating for my and every American’s rights, and helping ensure many great homes can remain candidates to help the children in foster care.”

Oregon justified its dictates in the name of children’s welfare, but a large body of evidence finds that “affirming” gender confusion does more harm than good, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

In 2024, National Health Service (NHS) England’s landmark Cass Review found that “gender medicine” is “built on shaky foundations” and that while such interventions require a great deal of caution, “quite the reverse happened in the field of (so-called) gender care for children,” and that “(w)hile a considerable amount of research has been published in this field, systematic evidence reviews demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies, meaning there is not a reliable evidence base upon which to make clinical decisions, or for children and their families to make informed choices.”

In April, a study of “all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019” in Finland (2,083 people) found that those who had gone through gender transitions had “markedly higher psychiatric morbidity (other mental health issues) than controls before and after referral, with treatment needs often persisting and even intensifying after medical interventions.”

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who suffered under transitioning before returning to their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.

Yet Oregon has been notoriously hostile to residents with traditional conservative and religious views. The state attempted to force pro-life groups to insure employees’ abortions until a federal judge stopped it earlier this year, and there have been cases of teachers who found their jobs imperilled or parents barred from school grounds for objecting to “gender-affirming” school policies.