On March 22, the Wall Street Journal’s Sierra Dawn McLain reported on a Washington State couple whose license to foster children has been denied because their Christianity runs afoul of new bureaucratic rules privileging an innovation called SOGIE. Readers who can’t immediately unravel the entire acronym will doubtless intuit that it has something to do with the great god sexual diversity, namely “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity/Expression.” Foster parents in the Evergreen State, like their neighbours in Oregon, must now bend the knee to support SOGIE regardless of their own spiritual convictions.
Support, McLain reports, doesn’t just mean being loving, caring, fostering parents. It means they must accept the display of “Pride flags and similar indicators,” have “LGBTQIA+ authors, musicians and artists” in collections at home and “seek affirming medical care” for a fostered child.
In practice, it means that once children have ceased listening to an LGBTQIA+ playlist and walked out the door past the Pride flag flying on the foster parents’ home front, their guardians must grant their wishes to be conveyed to medical appointments for hormone shots, surgery, puberty blockers and the like.
To those who would reflexively say the State can’t be serious about this level of interference in the lives of citizens who’ve already proved themselves admirable fosters of needy children, the simple answer is: Oh, yes, it can. It’s now routine in an era when human rights have been so degraded by ideologues wielding the power to declare their preferences über alles among equals.
In fact, McLain writes, the family her article focuses on are now prohibited from fostering any children, not just LGBTQIA+SOGIEs. Indeed, she says, the State insists on putting foster children in hotel rooms rather than allowing them to stay in the caring homes of Christians whose creed prevents the mandatory “affirming” of SOGIE ideology.
Of course, the whole thing is off to the courts, as is now standard operating practice in North America. Inevitably, it will drag on for years until some watered-down half-baked edict vaguely upholding constitutional guarantees of religious freedom is handed down. Or not.
As for any who would dismiss the whole shebang as distant and nothing to do with us as Canadians, we counsel waiting and watching as our federal government’s menacing Online Harms Act begins to chomp its way through the shreds of religious protection left in Charter of Rights guarantees of freedom of religion and conscience. It is to sigh, the precursor to weeping.
And yet. For all the adversity the current craze for a misguided understanding of diversity brings us as people of Catholic faith in particular, we must turn our fears to joy. Why? Because it’s Easter. We are an Easter people, after all, and if current affairs look bad now, bub, just recall how much worse they were in the darkness at noon when the Temple curtain was torn in two. That is, when human beings — that would be all of us past, present and future as God’s creatures — nailed the Saviour of humanity to a Cross.
Yup. That’s what we did then. That’s what we do now. It’s how we roll, how we have rolled since Adam, but also, glory be, what brought us to the Resurrection and life everlasting. It’s not just that we get knocked down and get up again. It’s that He fell three times, was crucified, died, descended into Hell and rose again.
Our Faith, our catholic and apostolic Holy Mother Church rose after Him to gather and shelter and nurture and foster the Faith within and among us. Us, here, meaning, again, all of us who bang in the nails, all of us poor sinners, we poor banished children of Eve, in all our diversity and unity in Him and with Him.
We are His children and if the gates of Hell can’t prevail against Him, neither can the ideological shenanigans of the mundane world prevail against our Faith. That’s not optimism. It’s hope. It’s the blessed joy of Easter, which we at The Register wish everyone reading this.