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 i...