Couple Sues MA, Asserts Religious Right to Reject LGBTQ+ Foster Youth
A Massachusetts couple is suing the state after their application to become foster parents was rejected. Mike and Kitty Burke said that they would not affirm an LGBTQ+ youth who was placed in their home.
by Evan Urquhart
The law firm behind several notable Supreme Court cases, including the Hobby Lobby decision giving businesses owned by religious people broad license to impose their views on employees, has taken the case of a Catholic couple in Massachusetts. Mike and Kitty Burke believe they have the right to be approved as foster parents, even though their Catholic faith would come before the best interests of an LGBTQ+ foster youth who was placed in their home.
According to the suit, filed yesterday in Massachusetts, the Burkes completed foster care training and had many nice things said about them by the state workers who conducted the interviews to assess their fitness as foster parents. However, the suit states that the Burkes were not ultimately licensed by the state because their Catholic views were incompatible with providing an safe home for LGBTQ+ youth. It describes the Burkes as “faithful Catholics” whose “honorable and decent beliefs include a belief “that children should not undergo procedures that attempt to change their God-given sex” and “Catholic beliefs about marriage and sexuality.”
The suit has already been widely covered in the right wing press including Fox News, the National Review, and the Washington Examiner. The piece in the Washington Examiner particularly singled out the Burkes’ views on gender-affirming care, as does a piece in Newsweek on the case. However, according to the suit the Burkes also expressed traditional Catholic views on gay and lesbian identities, with Kitty Burke saying that she a gay or lesbian child “would need to live a chaste life.”
screenshot from the lawsuit pdf
LGBTQ+ youth are greatly overrepresented in the child welfare system, with many estimates hovering around a third of all young people in foster care. Such youth are often subjected to abuse, conversion therapy, and family rejection by religious families, placing them at a much higher risk of homelessness and running away.
In the lawsuit, Becket cites their own success in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a 2021 case where the court upheld the right of Catholic foster care agencies to discriminate against prospective foster parents who were LGBTQ+.
screenshot from lawsuit pdf
Becket has successfully argued a number of religious “liberty” cases before the Supreme Court, expanding the right of religious people to discriminate and limiting the rights of others not to be discriminated against or live free of religiously motivated restrictions on their lives. While the outcome is impossible to predict at this early date, unlike many of the lawsuits we cover this is a serious lawsuit from a firm with a record of winning in front of the increasingly conservative U. S. Supreme Court, not pure headline-bait.